Setu vs Refrens: Quoting and Invoicing for a Service Business in 2026

A service business lives on a three-step loop: send a quote, turn the accepted one into an invoice, then chase the invoice until it is paid. The loop is not complicated. What makes it expensive is that each step usually happens in a different place — a quote in a document editor, an invoice in a billing app, the chasing in WhatsApp — so nobody can answer "what is outstanding right now" without opening three things.

Refrens has built a genuine platform around that loop, aimed squarely at Indian freelancers, agencies and service firms. Setu answers it with free browser tools: a Quotation Generator that feeds an Invoice Generator, with the receivable side sitting next to them. This post is about which of those two trades fits your business in 2026.

What Refrens is built to do

Refrens is a documents-and-money platform. Quotes, proforma invoices, invoices, purchase orders, expenses and delivery challans all live in one account, with a client list underneath so a repeat customer is not retyped. Around that sit the things that matter once a business is past a certain size: recurring invoices, multi-currency, payment reminders that go out on their own, GST reporting, e-invoicing with IRN generation, and bank reconciliation on the upper tiers. There is even a services arm where a dedicated accountant does the books for you.

As publicly listed in September 2026, the India pricing runs roughly like this. The Basic plan is free but capped at 15 documents with 2 users. Accounts Lite is ₹7,080 a year for unlimited documents, branding removal, recurring invoices and multi-currency. Accounts Pro is ₹18,000 a year and adds the GST machinery — e-invoices and bulk IRN, automated GSTR reports, bank reconciliation and P&L. Above that, Workflows at ₹26,400 and Operations at ₹46,800 add approvals, roles, inventory and multi-location. Check refrens.com/refrens-premium for the current figures before you budget; plan names and limits move, and comparison sites quote stale numbers for months.

The number to sit with is 15. Not 15 a month on the free tier as many tools do it — 15 documents, which a working consultancy passes inside a quarter. The free plan is a real trial, not a permanent home, and Refrens is honest about that. The question is whether the first paid step is buying you something you need.

What Setu's tools do instead

Setu splits the loop into separate free tools that hand off to each other. You build a quote in the Quotation Generator, and when it is accepted the same line items become a GST invoice in the Invoice Generator rather than being retyped. The Customer Ledger holds what each client has been billed and has paid, the Customer Statement produces the summary you send when someone asks what they owe, and the Invoice Aging Report tells you which invoices have crossed thirty, sixty and ninety days.

There is no document cap, no account and no seat. The data stays in your browser, which is why it costs nothing to run and why you should export it regularly.

What it does not do is the important half. There is no automated reminder that goes out while you sleep, no recurring invoice that raises itself on the first of the month, no client portal, no e-invoicing or IRN generation, no multi-currency conversion, and no approval chain. Every one of those is a real feature, and if you need one you are past what a free browser tool should be asked to do.

The honest comparison

Read that for the row that is genuinely a problem this quarter, not the one that would be nice in a year. For a two-person consultancy raising eight invoices a month to Indian clients, most of the rows favouring Refrens describe work they do not have.

The three questions that actually decide it

How many documents a month? Below roughly ten, the free tools plus a disciplined folder are genuinely fine. Above thirty, the retyping and the version confusion start costing more than a plan does, and a platform earns its money on volume alone.

Are you required to issue e-invoices? This is the cleanest yes-or-no in the whole comparison. E-invoicing with IRN generation becomes mandatory once aggregate turnover crosses the notified threshold, and that threshold has been lowered more than once — check the current figure against your own turnover rather than assuming last year's answer still holds. If you are inside it, you need software that generates an IRN, and no free document tool will do. If you are outside it, you are paying for a feature you cannot use.

Who chases the money? If someone in your business reliably works a list every Monday, an aging report is enough. If nobody does, automated reminders are not a luxury; they are the only thing that will happen. Be honest about which business you are, because this is where most of the unpaid money in small service firms actually sits.

Getting the document types right

Whichever tool you use, the sequence matters more than the software. A quotation is an offer and creates no tax liability. A proforma invoice is a request for payment before supply — useful for advances, still not a tax document. A tax invoice is the one that carries GST, feeds your returns and lets your client claim credit. Businesses that blur the three end up either claiming credit against something that was never an invoice, or issuing a tax invoice months before the work is done.

Two practical rules keep it clean. Number tax invoices in one unbroken series and never reuse or skip a number, because a gap is the first thing anyone reviewing your books will ask about. And when a quote changes, revise the quote rather than editing an invoice that has already gone out — a credit note exists for a reason.

Where each one starts to hurt

Setu's tools hurt when the client list gets long enough that you cannot remember who was quoted what. There is no CRM underneath them, so the memory has to be yours or your ledger's. They also hurt if you want the record accessible from a second device or a second person — browser-held data is private by design, which also means it is local by design.

Refrens hurts if you buy a tier for one feature. The jump from Lite to Pro more than doubles the price, and it is the GST and e-invoicing machinery you are paying for. A business that does not need IRN generation and buys Pro anyway has bought an expensive way to send the same invoices. Work out which tier the one feature you need sits in, and price that tier honestly against a year of the free route.

A sequence that does not waste money

Start free and build the habit, because the habit is what actually gets you paid. Quote from a template so the terms and validity date are always there. Convert accepted quotes the same week. Review the aging report every Monday and send two follow-ups — the friendly one at day seven past due and the firmer one at day thirty. Our note on Setu's Invoice Generator against Vyapar covers the same trade from the retail side, where the volume assumptions differ.

Move to a paid platform when one of three things is true: documents crossed the point where retyping is a real cost, an e-invoicing obligation applies to you, or nobody is doing the Monday chase and receivables are ageing because of it. Buying earlier does not create the discipline. It just adds a subscription to the same problem.

And if the honest answer is that nobody has time for any of it, the fix is not a different tool. Setu's accounting and bookkeeping service keeps the ledgers, reconciliations and monthly statements running on whatever cadence suits you, in the software you already use, so the receivable position is current without you maintaining it. The free tools stay free either way.

What to test before you commit

Whichever way you go, export a full month and open it before you depend on the tool. Confirm it carries the invoice number, date, client, taxable value, tax split and payment status — not just a total. An invoice history you cannot pull out cleanly is a history you will retype at your next software change, and the second migration always costs more than the first.