Looking for the best apps to make self-employed life easier? Whether you’re just starting out as a tech freelancer or you’re an experienced contractor looking to optimise your work, like us at wellpaid.io, we’ve found the top apps designed to help you succeed. Keep reading to find the best apps for the self-employed.

What Apps Does An Independent Contractor Need?

As IT contractors ourselves, we know there’s an app out there for pretty much everything. The best apps for the self-employed can help you with:

  • Finding clients and projects
  • Accounting, tax, and payments
  • Creating proposals and contracts
  • Productivity and project management
  • Collaboration with clients and other developers
  • Communication and meetings

A lot of the apps in this article overlap with regards to the features and services they offer. Deciding which apps will make self-employed life easier depends entirely on your own requirements, but we’ve lined up their key features and pricing to help you choose.

Best App For Finding Freelance Clients

Before you worry about accounting, productivity, and collaboration, you need to have clients. Amongst the countless freelancer marketplaces on the internet, you want an app specifically designed for tech contractors that will help you find trustworthy clients, allow you to contact them directly, and won’t cost you the earth. That’s where wellpaid.io comes in.

wellpaid.io

The best recruiter-free platform for self-employed developers and designers to grow their client base and find projects to suit them.

Key Features

  • No recruiters, so you get better rates as you’re not paying commission, unlike with other freelancer platforms. With that said, you can open your job search to opportunities from recruitment sites if you want.
  • Specify your own budget, tax residency and availability and filter jobs according to your requirements.
  • Find hirers who are specifically looking for outside IR35 contractors.
  • Enjoy direct communication with hirers rather than dealing with recruiters.
  • Define your own contracts for full flexibility. Other platforms, like Toptal, only facilitate fixed contracts.
  • Contractors are vetted by tech experts so you know you are part of a quality database of fellow freelancers.
  • Access £1000s of discounts on other great apps for self-employed developers.

Pricing

It’s completely free to create a contractor profile on wellpaid.io. However, you can choose to upgrade to a Pro membership for just £19 per month, which boosts your profile up the list of freelancers, allows hirers to contact you for free, and gives you loads of great discounts. Hirers are also charged a monthly fee rather than paying commission!

Best Apps For The Self-Employed: Accounting & UK Taxes

Working out all the ever-changing legalities of being self-employed and making sure your work is above board can be overwhelming. Using the right app to manage your accounting, taxes, and pay as a tech freelancer can save you huge amounts of time and energy.

If you want an app that can also accept payment, big-name platforms like Stripe and PayPal have their benefits. However, it’s worth investing in an accounting app tailored to your tax residency country.

FreeAgent

Award-winning and highly-rated software for UK self-employed and small business accounting and taxes.


Key Features

  • Create and send invoices and invoice reminders automatically.
  • Track billable and non-billable time (meaning you don’t need an additional app to track your hours), and generate flexible timesheets and invoices based on different hourly rates.
  • Track business costs and manage expenses, including scanning and storing photos of receipts.
  • Manage UK taxes easily with self-assessments, VAT filing, and IR35 advice and support.
  • Analyze your income with business insights and accounting reports.
  • Integrate your online banking accounts.
  • Handle your finances yourself easily with the support of the app’s accountants or nominate your accountant to input data for you. You can get discounts on accountancy services with your wellpaid.io Pro membership.
  • Built-in project management tool.
  • Accessible on desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Pricing

FreeAgent is free for NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank NI, and Mettle business current account holders. Otherwise, monthly subscription prices start at £9.50 plus VAT for sole traders and £29 plus VAT for limited companies, including a free 30-day trial for all users.

Best Apps For The Self-Employed: Proposals & Contracts

Bonsai

Focus on your work rather than your paperwork using Bonsai to create, review, and send proposals and contracts.

Key Features

  • Craft structured proposals with clear estimates.
  • Easily generate and send vetted contracts that can be e-signed within minutes.
  • Manage clients and projects, and all their associated documents, files, and payments in one place.
  • Time tracking and automated timesheet generation.
  • Task manager, which could save you money investing in other project management tools.
  • Create and send invoices and invoice reminders, and accept payments.
  • Accounting: automatic expense tracking, income reporting, and estimated tax planning. UK tax residents should note that Bonsai isn’t fully geared towards the UK tax system and doesn’t provide IR35 support.

Pricing

The Workflow plan, which includes unlimited clients and projects and access to the above features, is $19 per month.

Best Apps For Productivity & Project Management

As a freelancer, your time is one of your most important assets. Managing your productivity is key to maintaining a healthy work-life balance and ensuring you’re meeting deadlines across multiple projects. From tracking your hours to reducing distractions, these are the best apps for the self-employed looking to manage projects and improve productivity.

Basecamp

The project management tool built by web designers frustrated by relying on email, Basecamp helps contractors and teams communicate and collaborate better.


Key Features

  • Calendar schedule: add events and projects with dates, times, and date ranges and integrate with Google Calendar, iCal, and Outlook.
  • To-do lists: set due dates, add notes and file attachments, and assign tasks to others if you’re subcontracting. Get daily digests by email and set up notifications to keep track of what’s due.
  • File sharing and storage: drag and drop upload, all files include a complete version history, integrate with Google Docs, colour code files.
  • Communication: message board, live chat, and email forwarding from clients directly to Basecamp.
  • Client access: share to-dos, messages, and more with clients by creating public links; keep everything private until you choose to share.
  • Integrations with tons of third-party tools.

Pricing

The Basecamp personal plan is completely free and ideal for freelancers. With that said, to access unlimited projects and clients and full access to its features, you’ll need Basecamp Business, which is charged at $99 per month with a 30-day free trial.

While this price may not be accessible to all self-employed developers, it’s worth adding up the cost of individual apps whose functions Basecamp includes, like Slack and Google Drive, to assess which will offer better value for money.

Other Great Productivity Apps For Self-Employed Devs

Habitica

If you’re a tech contractor who also loves RPG games, Habitica is a fun app that gamifies your to-do list progress. You create your avatar for free, battle monsters, and earn rewards each time you complete one of your tasks.

The Silver Searcher

This free and open-source tool allows you to search source code across platforms. It runs on Windows and Unix-like OSs and is designed to save you significant time reading and searching through code for a specific line.

Best Apps For Self-Employed Dev Collaboration

GitHub

Build, ship, and maintain your software on the world’s largest and most advanced development platform. Some developers even use GitHub as their main project management tool, instead of investing in a platform like Basecamp.

Key Features

  • Public and private repositories: host open-source or private code respectively, and collaborate with any GitHub member or individuals you share the repos with.
  • Automated workflows: automate, customize, test, and execute code.
  • Scan and secure code for any vulnerability before it reaches production.
  • Project management: organize and monitor feature requests, bugs, and more, plus create and track task lists and project boards.

Pricing

Free for unlimited public and private repositories, collaboration, and issue tracking. For more advanced access to Github’s features, it’s $4 per user per month.

Best Apps For Self-Employed Communication

Slack

For real-time chat communication as well as video and voice calls, Slack is one of the leading communications apps out there.


Key Features

  • Group and direct messaging for instant communication, much quicker than back-and-forth emails with clients
  • Voice and video calls including screen sharing
  • Secure file sharing: drag and drop pretty much any type of file up to 1GB, or quickly add them from other apps like Google Drive.
  • Integrations with over 2000 third-party apps.
  • Channels: perhaps more useful for teams than self-employed developers, channels can still be used to share ideas and work towards a specific common purpose

Pricing

While Slack can be used for free, you’ll need the $6.25 per month Pro plan to be able to communicate with external clients.

What Apps Do You Use As A Contractor?

Having eyed up our recommendations for the best apps for the self-employed, how many of them do you use? Of course, the list is by no means exhaustive, and we’re always up for hearing fellow tech contractors’ tips for great apps. Create your contractor profile for free, join the wellpaid.io community and share your best apps with us!