AND CO

What do you like best?

AND CO organized all of my client information conveniently in one place. Its user interface was beautiful. I joined AND CO because I was looking for a program that would allow me to process credit cards, track time, manage client contacts, and manage invoices efficiently. I had been doing everything manually, so when I started using this program it was a godsend. Their support team was and still is fantastic. I sent in a feature request that after some time was accepted and implemented, which felt really great.

What do you dislike?

Two years ago no competitor was offering the breadth of features that AND.CO offered for free. It felt like someone out there was finally rooting for me as a newly started out freelancer, rather than charging hefty fees (ahem, Bonsai at $16/month billed annually). I began to worry when I read that AND.CO was bought by Fiverr roughly a year ago. Press releases said nothing would change, therefore the software would remain free. A few months later the free account only allowed for one active client, which is workable if you archive clients you don't need right away. They created one alternative Pro plan that costs a whopping $18/month billed annually. AND.CO still had a lot of great features and I loved the customer service so I cut my losses and started archiving and unarchiving clients. Cut to May 2020: COVID-19 has put available work at an all-time low for many freelancers. Self-employed workers have endured over a month of no unemployment benefits and are just now getting some relief (if they can manage to successfully apply and meet the requirements). AND.CO chooses this time to inform me that you can no longer unarchive archived clients on the free account. Basically you can only have one client total, which makes the free account useless for most freelancers. I'm disgusted, I thought they cared more about their users. This was such a hard blow I switched to Harvest the same day I got the email. Over the last month, I'd been getting emails from AND.CO that said things like "we understand that these times can prove to be challenging for many freelancers and we want to do everything we can to ensure you get ahead of this all." If that's true and you really care, then make getting paid affordable for freelancers. Freelancers aren't going to get "ahead of this all" if they have to shell out $200 to keep getting paid. I don't want your pandemic business tips, I don't want your useless Fiverr "Rising Talent" status, I just want to be able to afford to be a freelancer. (And also, I have no work right now so why would I want to pay $200 for an invoicing software when I have no invoices to send!) They've clearly gone corporate, this was a classic example of corporate greed, and I'm not having it.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Don't use it. Any company that starts their software out free, then requires that the people who have used and depended on that software for years start paying for it during a pandemic is not a company you want to work with. I loved the people at AND.CO before it was bought by Fiverr, but I can see now that the company has gone completely corporate and is not considering the welfare of its users anymore.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

AND CO has allowed me to accept credit cards and easily manage long distance clients which is a huge benefit because it broadened my scope of possible clients and made me more appealing to prospective clients. It has helped me stay organized and automatically sends my clients alerts which has helped me reduce incidents of overdue invoices. All of these features were previously free, but are now only useable for more than one client if you have a paid Pro plan. There are other softwares like Bonsai and Harvest that do the same things for less.