Freelancing has a hidden second job attached to it. The work you're paid for — the design, the code, the writing — is only part of the week. The rest is quoting, chasing, invoicing, tracking what you spent, remembering to follow up with the client who went quiet, and working out whether you can actually take on the project starting Monday. None of it is billable, and all of it has to happen.
The usual answer is software: a CRM here, a proposal tool there, an invoicing subscription, a time tracker, a spreadsheet holding the parts nothing else covers. Each is $10–30 a month, each wants an account, and collectively they hold your entire client list on someone else's servers.
The freelance tools on FWD Tools take the opposite approach. There are 17 of them, most sharing a single Freelance Hub toolbar so moving between them is one click, and every one runs entirely in your browser — your client names, rates, contracts, and invoice history are stored on your own device, not uploaded. No account, no subscription, no trial that expires halfway through a project.
Here's the whole set, in the order you'd actually meet them across a job.
Who this is for
- Freelancers and contractors who need the admin layer of a business without paying a monthly fee per function, and who'd rather not have their entire client list in a third-party database.
- Anyone going independent for the first time, who mostly needs to know what to charge, what a proposal should contain, and what to do when a client requests "one more small thing."
- Side-project and part-time freelancers, for whom three invoices a quarter genuinely does not justify an invoicing subscription.
- Studios of one to three people who've outgrown a notes app but find a full agency platform absurd for the volume of work they run.
Before the work: knowing what to charge
- Freelance Rate Calculator — The tool to use before anything else here. You enter the income you want, your tax rate, your business expenses, and how many hours you can realistically bill, and it works backwards to a minimum rate (the number below which you're losing money), a recommended rate with margin, a day rate, and a comparison against market ranges. The number most people underquote isn't their hourly rate — it's how few of their working hours are actually billable, and this makes that visible.
- Working Days Calculator — Count the business days between two dates, with Saturday and Sunday each toggleable and a box where you paste your own days off. Deadlines, notice periods, and "how many days is this project really?" all become one calculation instead of counting on a calendar.
Winning the work: leads, intake, proposals, contracts
- Client CRM — Client profiles with company, contact details, status (Lead, Active, Paused, Past client), their rate or budget, notes, and free-text project history. The header keeps a live count of clients, active clients, and pending follow-ups, and flags any follow-up date that's gone past. It's the smallest CRM that still does the one job a CRM exists for: remembering that you said you'd get back to someone.
- Client Intake Form Builder — Build a reusable intake questionnaire, save each client's answers locally, and export the responses. Worth more than it sounds: most scope disasters begin with a project that started before anyone asked what the deadline, the budget, or the approval process actually was.
- Proposal Builder — A proposal has a title, a client, a value and currency, a valid-until date, and four blocks that decide whether you get the job: scope, deliverables, timeline, and terms. It tracks status (Draft, Sent, Accepted, Declined), shows your open pipeline value at the top, saves any proposal as a reusable template, and prints a client-ready document you can save as PDF. It even ships a default payment term — 50% upfront, balance before final handoff — which is the term new freelancers most often forget to include.
- Contract Template Manager — Contracts built from reusable clauses, with client details, signer name, signed date, and template saving. The point is the clause library: you write your late-payment clause, your revision-limit clause, and your kill-fee clause once, and then every future contract has them instead of you rewriting from memory at 11pm.
Doing the work: hours, capacity, scope, client visibility
- Time Tracker — A start/stop timer plus manual entries, tagged by client, with billable revenue totals, client filtering, CSV timesheets, JSON backup, and optional private GitHub Gist sync. The CSV export is the important bit: it's what you attach when a client asks what the 14 hours consisted of.
- Freelance Availability Planner — Booked projects with weekly capacity, start and end dates, showing your active load, open slots, and an explicit overload warning. This is the tool that answers "can I take this on?" with something other than optimism, and it's the one most freelancers don't have at all.
- Scope Creep Tracker — Log the original scope, then every change request against it: what was asked, whether it was approved, and what it's worth as extra billable work. The header totals how many requests need a quote and how much extra value is sitting in them. Scope creep isn't usually one big betrayal — it's eleven small favors, and this is the record that turns them back into line items.
- Client Portal Lite — A per-project checklist of links, files you're waiting on, milestones, status, and handoff notes, with counts of what's waiting, in review, and complete. It replaces the "just to confirm where we are" email thread that eats a Monday morning.
- Freelance Dashboard — The workspace the rest of the set orbits: daily focus tasks with a timestamped work log, a full kanban board, and a world clock for clients in other timezones. If you keep one tab open all day, this is the one.
Getting paid: invoices, milestones, retainers, chasing
- Freelance Invoice Generator — Build a professional invoice with your logo, client details, unlimited line items, tax and discount, previewed live as you type, then download as PDF or print. This is the "I need to send an invoice in the next ten minutes" tool, and it needs no setup at all.
- Local Invoice Tracker — Where the invoice generator makes one document, this keeps the ledger: line items, due dates, paid amounts, and a header showing unpaid count, outstanding balance, and total billed. Overdue invoices are flagged automatically against today's date, and any invoice prints to a clean page you can send.
- Milestone Payment Tracker — For work split into deposit and stages: milestone value, due date, paid date, paid amount, and outstanding balance per project. Any project big enough to invoice in parts is big enough to lose track of which parts you've been paid for.
- Retainer Tracker — Monthly retainers with included hours, used hours, deliverables, renewal dates, and rollover notes, plus your monthly recurring revenue and hours remaining at the top. Retainers quietly turn unprofitable when nobody counts the hours against the cap — this counts them.
- Follow-Up Reminder Board — Reminders for leads, proposals, invoices, testimonials, and projects, showing what's due today and what's overdue. Most unpaid invoices are not disputes; they're emails nobody sent. This is the board that makes sure they get sent.
Keeping the books
- Freelance Expense Tracker — Software subscriptions, contractors, hardware, travel, marked tax-deductible where they apply, with total spent and deductible totals, and CSV export for your accountant or your tax return. Freelancers routinely overpay tax simply by forgetting the $14-a-month tools they've been paying for all year.
- Notepad and Bookmark Keeper — The two general-purpose tools that ride along in the same toolbar, for meeting notes and for the pile of client links, references, and logins-to-set-up that every project accumulates.
What makes this set different from a stack of SaaS tools
Twelve of these — the CRM, proposals, contracts, intake forms, scope, follow-ups, invoices, expenses, retainers, portals, availability, and milestones — are built on the same foundation, which means once you've learned one you already know the rest:
- Your data is stored in your browser, in IndexedDB. Not on a server, not in an account. Nothing to breach, nothing to lose access to when a company pivots or raises its prices.
- A live metrics row on every tool. Each one opens with the four numbers that matter for that job — outstanding balance, open pipeline value, hours left on the retainer, overdue follow-ups — computed from your records rather than typed in.
- Search across everything you've written. Every tool searches its own records, including free-text notes, so "what did I quote that agency in March?" is one query rather than a scroll.
- Real exports, not lock-in. CSV for spreadsheets and accountants, JSON for a full backup you can import again later, and a print-ready document for proposals, contracts, and invoices. Your data leaves as easily as it went in.
- Optional encrypted sync. If you want the same records on a laptop and a desktop, each tool can back up to a private GitHub Gist encrypted with AES-GCM using your own passphrase — so syncing doesn't mean handing your client list to anyone, including us.
- Deleted records can be restored. Deletion is soft, so an accidental delete during a phone call isn't the end of a client record.
- One shared toolbar. A Freelance Hub bar sits at the top of the set — seventeen entries covering the dashboard, the client and money tools, and the notepad and bookmarks — so moving from the time tracker to the invoice tracker to the follow-up board is a single click rather than a bookmark hunt.
A realistic workflow through the set
- A lead arrives. Add them to the Client CRM with a status of Lead and a follow-up date. Send the intake form before you quote anything.
- Check you can take it. The Availability Planner tells you whether the calendar agrees with your enthusiasm.
- Price it. The Rate Calculator for the rate, the Working Days Calculator for the timeline.
- Quote it. Write the proposal from your template, print it to PDF, mark it Sent, and set a follow-up on the reminder board.
- Sign it. Assemble the contract from your saved clauses and record the signed date.
- Do the work. Track the hours, run the day from the dashboard, keep the client's outstanding items in Client Portal Lite, and log every "quick extra" in the Scope Creep Tracker.
- Bill it. Export the timesheet as CSV, raise the invoice, and record it in the invoice tracker — or tick off the stage in the Milestone Payment Tracker.
- Chase it. The follow-up board shows what's overdue; the invoice tracker shows what's outstanding.
- Keep the receipts. Log costs in the Expense Tracker as they happen, and export CSV at year end.
Frequently asked questions
Are these freelance tools really free?
Yes — all 17, with no account, no trial, no per-invoice limit, and no feature held back for a paid tier.
Where is my client data stored?
In your own browser, using IndexedDB. It isn't uploaded to a server, which means no one else can read it — and also that it lives on that specific browser and device, so exporting a JSON backup now and then is worth doing.
Can I use these on more than one computer?
Yes, two ways. Export a JSON backup from one machine and import it on the other, or turn on the optional GitHub Gist sync, which stores an encrypted copy in a private Gist under your own GitHub account using a passphrase you choose. Without that passphrase the contents are unreadable — including to us.
What happens if I clear my browser data?
Records stored only in that browser are cleared with it. That's the trade-off for having no server involved. Take a JSON backup at the end of a project, or enable Gist sync, and this stops being a risk.
Can I send an invoice or proposal to a client from here?
You produce the document here and send it however you already send things. Proposals, contracts, and invoices print to a clean client-ready page you can save as PDF and attach to an email. There's no built-in mail sending, because that would require an account and a server.
Do these handle tax or accounting properly?
They handle the record-keeping — line items, totals, tax and discount on invoices, deductible flags on expenses, CSV exports your accountant can open. They aren't accounting software and won't file anything for you. For most sole freelancers, clean CSV exports are exactly what the accountant wanted anyway.
Is there a mobile version?
They run in a mobile browser, though the record-heavy tools are more comfortable on a laptop. Bear in mind that browser storage is per-device, so a phone and a laptop hold separate data unless you sync or import a backup.
What if I only need one of them?
That's fine — each tool is its own page and works alone. The invoice generator and the rate calculator are the natural entry points, and the rest are there when the corresponding problem shows up.
Start where it hurts
You don't need to adopt seventeen tools this afternoon. Pick the part of the admin that's currently costing you the most: if you're undercharging, start with the Freelance Rate Calculator; if you're owed money, the Local Invoice Tracker and the Follow-Up Reminder Board; if projects keep growing after they start, the Scope Creep Tracker. The shared toolbar will introduce you to the rest as you need them.
Browse the full set of free tools on FWD Tools — all browser-based, all free, and none of them asking you to sign up.
