Our story

Built by freelancers
who were tired of
losing money

AI Clientli started as a spreadsheet — a very, very complicated spreadsheet. It became a company when we realised the problem wasn't the spreadsheet. It was the entire infrastructure freelancers were expected to patch together themselves.

3,200+
Active freelancers
$2.4M
Invoiced monthly
9 days
Avg. payment time
2023
Founded
The origin

We built the tool
we desperately
needed ourselves

"I was billing $90 an hour and losing track of three hours a week. That's $14,000 a year I just didn't invoice for. The tools I was using weren't talking to each other."
— Alex Kovacs, Co-founder, AI Clientli

In 2022, Alex Kovacs was a freelance product designer earning a good living in Berlin. On paper, the business was working. In practice, it was hemorrhaging money in ways that were nearly invisible.

Three hours of unbilled work per week. An average invoice payment time of 52 days. A proposal win rate of 28%. Seven tools — Toggl, Wave, Notion, Calendly, DocuSign, Stripe, Gmail — each doing one thing, none of them aware of the others.

The frustrating part wasn't any single tool. It was the space between them. The manual data entry. The context switching. The time spent reconciling information across systems that should have been connected from the start.

Alex built the first version of AI Clientli for personal use in early 2023. Within three months of using it, he'd increased his monthly invoiced revenue by 31% — not by working more, but by capturing what he was already doing.

He showed it to two other freelancers. They asked if they could use it. He showed it to ten more. Same response. By mid-2023, AI Clientli was a company.

Q1 2023
Internal prototype
First version built as a personal tool. Revenue tracking + invoicing only.
Q2 2023
First 50 beta users
Time tracking and proposals added after repeated user requests. 50 freelancers onboarded.
Q3 2023
Company incorporated
AI Clientli GmbH founded in Berlin. Pre-seed funding closed. Team of 4.
Q4 2023
Desktop app launched
Linux, macOS, Windows. Flutter-based native app ships alongside the web version.
Q1 2024
1,000 active users
Stripe integration, recurring billing, and e-signature contracts shipped. 1k users milestone hit.
Now · 2025
3,200+ freelancers, $2.4M/mo invoiced
Public beta. Analytics, team features, and mobile app in active development.
What we believe

The principles that
shape everything we build

🔗
Connection over collection
Separate tools that don't talk to each other aren't a workflow — they're a liability. Every feature in AI Clientli exists inside a connected system, not as a standalone module bolted on for feature parity.
📊
Data belongs to the freelancer
Your client list, your invoice history, your time logs — they're yours. We don't hold your data hostage behind a cancellation wall. Export everything, anytime, in open formats.
🚫
No percentage. Ever.
We charge a flat subscription. We never take a cut of your invoices. The moment we tie our revenue to your invoice volume, our incentives stop being aligned with yours. That's a line we won't cross.
⚡
Speed is a feature
Creating an invoice should take 30 seconds, not 8 minutes. If a workflow feels slow in AI Clientli, that's a bug — not an expected UX. We obsess over the time cost of every interaction.
🌍
Built for independence
Freelancing is a choice that deserves to be supported, not patronised. We build tools that respect your intelligence, your autonomy, and your right to run your business however you see fit.
🔒
Privacy by design
Your client data, your revenue, your business performance — these are sensitive. We don't monetise your data. We don't sell aggregated insights about your business. We just build good software.
Our mission
"Every independent professional deserves business infrastructure as good as any well-funded company — without the overhead of building it themselves."

AI Clientli exists to close the gap between the experience of running a business as an employee of a well-resourced company, and the reality of doing it alone. The tools exist. The integration has always been the missing piece.

As mentioned in
Freelancer Weekly
Product Hunt
Indie Hackers
The Freelance Stack
Design Tools Daily

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