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Ask HN: What are you using to bill one-off online calls/meetings?

5 points by aosaigh ↗ HN
I receive a small, but non-trivial amount of emails that request my time (via a call or otherwise). When appropriate I reply (or chat) for free, but I can't do this for everything.

Instead of just saying "no", I'd prefer to have an option where I can tell the person to schedule a paid chat with me.

I've seen the likes of Code Mentor, but are there any services that cater for this in a more general-purpose way?

4 comments

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crypt0calypse
Are you looking for something to just send invoices or schedule and send invoices?

If it's the former, you could always use Quickbooks or something like simpleinvoices.io.

aosaigh
No, I probably wasn't very clear in the original post. More like a video chat service with billing built-in. Code Mentor allows you to have a video chat with somebody and it handles the payment depending on how long you were talking. I'm looking for a generic version of this (that isn't particularly geared toward coding/programming)
silviapfeiffer
We run a video consultation platform (https://www.coviu.com/) and you can activate a stripe integration to create appointment bookings with associated stripe payments (activate the "Client Payments" addon from https://coviu.com/addons). People can't enter the video call without having paid. You might want to check out if that solves your problem.
dgwight
I’m working on something like this: https://otechie.com. Otechie is starting off focused on support from open source maintainers, but will cover your use case.

What are you helping people with?