Freelancing as a developer is really two jobs

The first job is the one you're good at. You write the code, you ship the feature, you fix the bug at 11pm because you can't stop thinking about it. That job you chose.

The second job is the one nobody warned you about. It's the contract you're not sure is enforceable, the invoice you keep meaning to send, the client who's three weeks late while you're too conflict-averse to chase them, the tax folder that is technically just a shoebox. That job chose you and it's the reason a lot of genuinely talented developers quietly go back to full-time work.

I know because I lived in that second job for years. And the tools I reached for never quite fit. The freelance apps out there were built for photographers and consultants: lovely, generic, and completely blind to how a developer actually works. None of them knew what a repository was. None of them understood that "the work" and "the invoice" are two ends of the same thread. So I ran a browser with eight tabs open, the code in one, the money somewhere else, copy-pasting between them like it was 2011.

Eventually I stopped complaining and started building. That became LoomLance.

What it actually is

LoomLance is the business side of freelance development in one place: clients, projects, contracts, invoices, time tracking, expenses, and reports. On its own that's not new, plenty of tools do invoicing. What makes it different is that it's built by and for people who write code, so it bends toward your workflow instead of asking you to bend toward it.

A few examples of what "for developers" means in practice:

• Connect a GitHub repository to a project and the two sides finally talk. Pull issues into your board, and let smart-commits reference your task keys, so the work you ship links to the work you bill.
• When a project grows past its original scope and it always does, you can raise a change request, have the client approve the extra cost and time on a link, and turn it into an invoice in one click. No awkward mid-project money conversation.
• Invoices that don't look like a spreadsheet: branded, PDF-ready, with a public pay page so a client can settle up by card without creating an account.

The through-line is simple: stop context-switching. If the admin lives where the work lives, you spend less of your life being your own reluctant operations department and more of it doing the thing you're actually here to do.

Where it is right now

I'll be honest about the stage, because I'd want someone to be honest with me. LoomLance is young. It's live, it's real, people are using it, and there's a free Solo plan so you can try the whole thing without a credit card. There's also a roadmap I actually believe in: GitLab support, a credential vault for the API keys and secrets that pile up across client projects, income forecasting, and I ship against it steadily rather than promising the moon.

If you freelance and you write code, I think you'll recognize the problem it solves the moment you see it. That second job is never going to be the reason you got into this. But it doesn't have to be the reason you get out, either.

You can take a look at LoomLance here.