The code was the easy part. What costs you is the March conversation nobody wrote down, the estimate you gave verbally, the “quick change” that took two days, and the invoice you write from memory on a Sunday night.
Issue trackers were built for teams shipping a product, so they model tickets, sprints and velocity. None of them model a client who texts you a screenshot, agrees to a number on a call, and then remembers it differently in June.
So the commercial half of freelancing lives in email, a notes app and your head — and the invoice is a reconstruction rather than a record.
The gap isn’t project management. It’s the thread from what they asked for to what you charged.
Their words become line items and a total they accept on a link. No proposal template, no e-signature theatre.
Ground Control ⟶Billed at what you tracked, never what you quoted — lower automatically if it went quicker.
Standard ⟶Type it in yourself, or let them file it on a link of their own. Four months later it has a date on it either way.
Ground Control ⟶One click from the invoice line back to the meeting note it came out of.
Standard ⟶Every noun is yours. A project can be hourly, fixed-fee, or not billable at all — and the panels it shows change with it, so a retainer doesn’t look like a one-off build.
Mileage off, meetings on, tickets first: that’s a setup, not a support ticket.
“I already use an issue tracker and I’m not moving.”
Don’t. Keep it. It tracks the work, and it’s good at that. This tracks the relationship and the money — the request, the estimate, the hours, the invoice, and the thread between them.
Nothing here wants to be your repo, your CI, or your board. If you already have a system for shipping code, the only thing it’s missing is everything that happens either side of it.
Tracking hours and invoicing them is standard. Estimates and a door your clients can file into are Ground Control, +$12 — and the assistant is off until you add your own AI key, then billed by them, usually pennies.
A client texts you. That becomes a ticket, then an estimate, then tasks, then an invoice — one thread, nothing retyped.
It’s $24 for you. A subcontractor is $9 and gets their own Cockpit, not a read-only login.
Yes — a project can be flat-fee with hours tracked but not charged, which is the honest way to find out whether the fee was right.
A timer per task, a quiet strip while it runs, and a month total when you ask. No idle detection, no screenshots, nothing watching you.
They get a link per request, and a link per estimate. No account, no password, no portal to maintain — three links cover it.
$36 — $24 for everything standard plus $12 for Ground Control, which is the half your clients touch. The five tools that cover the same ground separately — a helpdesk, an issue tracker, a feedback board, a changelog tool and something to quote with — run $96–325 for one person.
That’s an afternoon, and it’ll tell you more than a trial checklist would. Two weeks free, no card, and if you go quiet you simply stop.
This is the short version of the site, cut down to what reads well on a small screen. The full thing — every instrument explained, the pricing configurator, the whole story — lives on the desktop site. So does the app: Cloudbase is meant to be worked from a real screen, at a desk, with your hands on it.