Solo dev. Was juggling Bitwarden, Toggl, Notion and a notebook. Now I bill 40% more and finish work by 5pm.
I'm Theo. Solo dev, mostly Laravel and Next.js builds for small e-commerce brands in the Netherlands. A year ago I was at 4 clients and constantly stressed. Today I'm at 9 active clients, billing roughly 40% more, and I close my laptop at five most days. This is the not-glamorous version of how that happened.
“Honestly the moment things changed was when I stopped using six different apps to run my one-person business. Boards, hours, secrets and client reports in one tab. Sounds simple. It is.”
Background
Solo doesn't mean simple.
Hey. I'm Theo. I've been freelancing full-time for about three years now, building Laravel apps and Next.js storefronts mostly for small Dutch e-com brands. Pre-Logbook my stack was: Notion for project notes, Trello for boards, Toggl Track for time, Bitwarden for client secrets, Stripe Atlas for invoicing, and a paper notebook on my desk for the things I never managed to put anywhere else.
I was making okay money — around €4500/month after taxes from four steady clients — but I was working maybe 50 hours a week to do it. The actual coding was fine. The admin was killing me. Pricing changes, status updates, asking client A if they wanted a feature flag toggle while client B's invoice was overdue and i couldn't remember what my Toggl entry from Tuesday was for.
4 → 9
Active clients
I doubled my client count. Not because I'm a better developer — I'm honestly the same dev I was a year ago. I just stopped losing 8-10 hours a week to context switching and admin.
+40%
Revenue
Went from ~€4500/mo to ~€6300/mo after taxes. The wild part is I'm working fewer hours per week now, around 38 instead of 50. Hourly rate went up because I track time properly and bill what I actually did.
5pm
Hard stop
I close my laptop at 5pm most days now. Used to be 7 or 8 because I'd remember at 5 that I forgot to log Tuesday's hours and that would spiral into 'might as well finish this PR while I'm here.'
€2.99
Per month
That's the Solo plan price. I was paying like €38/month across Toggl, Bitwarden, Notion plus and a paid Loom seat. So I'm saving €35/month on tools alone, plus the time savings.
The breaking point
I lost 15 minutes finding out if I'd shipped a feature.
The thing that pushed me over the edge wasn't a feature. It was an embarrassing moment. A client emailed me asking 'hey did you finish the email integration?' and I genuinely couldn't remember if i'd merged the PR or just opened it. I had to scroll Slack, GitHub and Notion for like fifteen minutes to figure it out. That's when I knew my system was broken.
I tried to fix it with a fancier Notion setup first. Spent a Saturday building a 'second brain' database. It was beautiful. I used it for like ten days and went back to the chaos. The problem wasn't my Notion structure. The problem was that nothing was connected.
How I switched, as a solo
Doing this as a solo means there's no migration team. It was just me, on a Saturday. Twice.
- 1
Day 1
Imported one client into Logbook
Picked my smallest client, copy-pasted their Trello board into a Logbook board, exported their Bitwarden vault for that project into the Logbook vault. Took like 90 minutes total. Most of that was me getting distracted on Hacker News.
- 2
Day 4
Migrated a second client
By day 4 I was already preferring the on-card timer. Toggl made me switch tabs. Logbook didn't. So I migrated client #2. Took 45 minutes. By the end of week one i had three of four clients on it.
- 3
Week 3
First auto-generated client report
Got my first monthly client report out of Logbook. It pulled my time, the cards I'd closed, and a summary. I added one paragraph of context and sent it. Client replied 'this is so much clearer than your usual report.' That was the moment I knew I wasn't going back.
- 4
Month 2
Took on client #5
I had capacity I didn't know I had. Said yes to a small Shopify build I would've turned down before. Realized I could probably handle 6 or 7 clients without dying. Spoiler: it ended up being 9.
What changed for me on a daily basis.
Before
The old way
- Toggl in one tab, Trello in another, Notion in a third, Bitwarden popup, Slack, Stripe — six tabs to do one task
- Logged time at end of week — 'i think i worked on client A on Tuesday?'
- Client passwords were in Bitwarden but I'd lose the link mapping which password belonged to which project
- Monthly reports were a 2-3 hour exercise per client. I had 4 clients. Do the math
- Stopped invoicing for things I couldn't remember doing — probably losing €300-500/month in unbilled work
After
With Logbook
- One tab. Card opens, timer starts, work happens, timer stops. That's the loop
- Time auto-logs to the card I'm working on. End-of-day summary tells me if I forgot to start anything
- Vault is per-project. Client A's secrets show up only when I'm in client A's project
- Reports take 15-20 min per client per month. Clients say they're better than before
- I bill what I actually did because the timer caught it. Probably +€400/mo on this alone
“The unlock for me was realising the timer is the magic. Not the boards, not the vault, not the reports. The fact that the timer lives ON the card means I track time without thinking about it. Everything else flows from that one design choice.”
Theo de Wit
Independent Developer
Stuff nobody tells you
What I'd warn other solos about.
Quick honest moment: the first month I forgot to use the timer maybe 20% of the time. Old habits. I'd open VS Code, start coding, and remember an hour in. Logbook lets you backfill which is fine — but it's better when you don't have to. After a month it became automatic. After two months I literally cannot start work without hitting the timer first. Pavlovian basically.
Another thing — the AI report summary is useful but I always edit it. It's good for structure and pulling stats but the 'voice' is too generic. I rewrite the intro paragraph every time. Five minutes well spent. Don't just send the AI version raw, your clients can tell.
What it added up to.
+€18k
Annual revenue lift
From going 4 → 9 clients. After taxes, after platform fees, real money in pocket. Year 1 numbers, before I optimized pricing on the new clients.
12 hours
Reclaimed per week
I was working 50/wk. I'm at 38 now. That's a part-time job worth of time back. I use most of it to ride my bike and play guitar badly.
0
Lost client passwords
Used to lose access to a client's hosting or DB credentials maybe twice a year. Always at the worst time. Hasn't happened once since switching the vault.
If you're a solo dev/designer reading this
Just try it. €2.99.
If you're a solo freelancer and you're juggling more than 3-4 tools to run your business — and you're starting to feel like the admin is the actual job — try the Solo plan for a month. €2.99 is genuinely less than a coffee in Amsterdam. Worst case you go back to your old setup having lost a few quid.
Best case you double your client base and start finishing work at five. That's been my year, anyway. Take that for what it's worth.
Try Solo for less than a coffee.
€2.99/mo, every module unlocked, your client gets a free portal seat. Cancel anytime — your data exports clean.