Update: 2015-06-17 Since I blogged this, I have been told I have 7 days to leave the service whilst on holiday. A SaaS horror story. :(

I logged my migration anguish over at [[7_days_to_leave_Hiveage]].

First, can I just say that Curdbee/Hiveage service has been good over the years. I like the product and I want to see it improve.

After complaining several times about Hiveage, I get this from support in Oct 2014:

On a somewhat related note, are you happy with using Hiveage? It seems you haven't had the most pleasant experience with it. There won't be many changes in the way we continue to develop the service, so if it isn't the right fit for your requirements, we would encourage you to find a service that does. A happy client is way more important to us than the subscription they pay us!

Unfortunately my feedback doesn’t seem welcome and my requests aren’t logged.

Here are some of Hiveage’s shortcomings for me:

Expects me to fill in client’s address customers, without prompting the customer to fill in their details.

This results in a LOT of copying and pasting on my behalf

And their inline modal UI for adding a new contact whilst creating an invoice is really silly: http://s.natalian.org/2015-06-16/1434440623_1918x1058.png

Broken invoice search

Can’t lookup my customers invoice based on the description I place on the invoices

No automatic reminders for invoices raised as drafts

Leading to all sorts of potential annoyances for customers

Missing one step method to mark invoice as paid

Requires 5 steps currently

No bitcoin support

I think they have support via coinbase now

No sane way to toggle options on a Web application

Their menu system is byzantine. Prepare to go through several layers of menus.

Good URL design would have helped here.

No way to add additional email addresses on a contact

Yes, sometimes a customer can have several email addresses that need to be notified when an invoice is issued.

No way to set defaults

You need to roll with their defaults, like for frequency of new invoices

Doesn’t remember updates to invoices

So if the quantity goes up, you have to change it in the recurring invoice, not the draft one…

Can’t have order number counters specific to customer

If I am billing a company called Acme&Acme, I like to set the order number as AA-1. It’s a strange requirement maybe. So the next I bill Acme&Acme it becomes, AA-2. However Hiveage cannot cope with this and any invoice will appear as AA-2 as the next invoice. Until I change it manually. E.g. I change it to ZZ-1 and then Hiveage naively goes to ZZ-2 for the next invoice.

No contacts API

So I have two disperate contact lists I have to maintain. One on Hiveage and one on Fastmail. Very annoying.