Building What We Couldn’t Find: Why We Built Summit for Small Businesses

A simple invoicing and finance tool for small businesses, built out of our own growing pains.

At Kugie, we believe that the best products are born out of real problems—and Summit is no exception. In fact, it’s our fastest product ever built—not just because of our brilliant development team, but because it came from a very real, very urgent internal need.

Since our inception a year ago, we’ve been managing all things finance manually: spreadsheets for bookkeeping, Microsoft Word for invoice templates, and a shared drive full of clutter. It worked… until it didn’t. As our projects and clients grew, so did the chaos. We knew we had to find a better way.

Like any scrappy team, we turned to tools already out there. Over the year, we tried out Invoice Ninja, Invoice Shelf, Akaunting, and more. These aren’t direct competitors—they’re great tools that taught us a lot. But they weren’t quite right for us. And we suspect many small businesses feel the same

What We Learned from the Tools We Tried

Invoice Shelf was our first go-to. It’s open-source and straightforward—but poorly maintained. Updates were rare, and bugs often stayed unresolved for months.

Then came Invoice Ninja. A much better experience overall, with an excellent UX and robust features. But its free plan only supports five clients—and with eight clients and counting, we hit a wall. Upgrading would cost us $120/year, which felt steep given our size and needs.

Lastly, we explored Akaunting, an all-in-one accounting platform with invoicing, expense tracking, and more. It seemed promising, especially as an open-source tool. But after multiple attempts to self-host it, we simply couldn’t get it to work.

After a year of trying, testing, and troubleshooting, we realized something:

What we truly needed was a simple, clean, and scalable invoicing tool—built specifically for small and growing businesses like ours.

Summit Is the Answer to Our Own Problem—And Maybe Yours Too

We didn’t set out to create “just another invoicing app.” We built Summit to be what we wished existed:

A lean, easy-to-use invoicing and finance automation tool that helps teams like ours:

• 📄 Create invoices and quotations in seconds
• 📬 Send them directly via email
• 🤖 Automate payment reminders and track statuses
• 🔁 Manage recurring payments or invoice cycles with ease
• 💸 Track income and expenses, organized by categories and sources
• 📊 Get a quick overview of our business's financial health through dashboard and reports

Summit is built with practicality and simplicity in mind. No bloated dashboards. No learning curve. Just the essentials—built right.

As stated in our GitHub README:

“We just want a tool that helps us create quotations, send invoices through email, and automate payments.”

That’s the core philosophy behind Summit.

Why Summit Stands Out

We’re not here to compete with enterprise-grade tools like Zoho Invoice or Square Invoices. We built Summit because we needed something simpler, faster, and more affordable.

Here’s how Summit differs:

Summit is made for the underdogs—the bootstrapped founders, the creative studios, the digital service providers just getting off the ground.

Soft Launch with a Big Vision

Summit is part of Kugie’s growing ecosystem of tools designed to help small businesses scale smarter, not harder. Whether you’re freelancing, running a boutique agency, or managing a growing startup, Summit is built to give you clarity and control over your finances—without the unnecessary bloat or cost.

It’s cheap. It’s clean. It works out of the box. And we’re here for you with 24/7 support.

Summit: Financial essentials. Nothing more.
Try it today: https://summitfinance.app