What is Crater used for?

Crater is an embedded finance platform that adds invoicing, bill pay, payments, lending, and accounting automation to other platforms via APIs and SDKs. It is a good fit for embedding invoicing and payment capabilities into a platform, providing working capital solutions to customers, and automating accounting and financial workflows.

Is Crater open source?

Yes. Crater is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at crater-invoice-inc/crater and is written mainly in PHP.

Yes. Crater is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.

Can I self-host Crater?

Yes. Crater can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Crater an alternative to?

Crater is an open-source alternative to Flow. Other open-source alternatives to Flow include InvoicePlane, Invoice Ninja and VoiceInk.

Is Crater actively maintained?

The most recent commit to Crater was on 10 August 2024, and the latest release is 6.0.6, published on 6 March 2022. The project has 8.4k stars on GitHub.

Crater: open-source alternative to Flow

About Crater

Crater is a platform that provides embedded accounts receivable and accounts payable automation. It offers invoicing workflows, payment processing via card or ACH, and working capital tools such as lending and buy now, pay later.

The platform includes a general ledger, accounting automation with integrations to QuickBooks and Xero, and an AI-powered Financial Copilot for financial questions and report generation. It is designed for developers to integrate via APIs, webhooks, and SDKs.

Key features

Invoicing workflows for sending and receiving invoices, with deposit acceptance on estimates
Payments via card or ACH, with Plaid integration for bank account connections
Lending tools including advances on accounts receivable and buy now, pay later for accounts payable
Accounting automation with data import/export to QuickBooks and Xero
General ledger functionality for tracking accounts, transactions, and financial activities
AI-powered Financial Copilot for answering financial questions and generating reports

Good fit for

Embedding invoicing and payment capabilities into a platform
Providing working capital solutions to customers
Automating accounting and financial workflows

Built with: PHP tools; Laravel tools; JavaScript tools; Vue tools
Tags: invoicing; payments; lending; accounting; embedded-finance; api

Crater: questions and answers

What is Crater used for?: Crater is an embedded finance platform that adds invoicing, bill pay, payments, lending, and accounting automation to other platforms via APIs and SDKs. It is a good fit for embedding invoicing and payment capabilities into a platform, providing working capital solutions to customers, and automating accounting and financial workflows.
Is Crater open source?: Yes. Crater is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at crater-invoice-inc/crater and is written mainly in PHP.
Is Crater free?: Yes. Crater is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
Can I self-host Crater?: Yes. Crater can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Crater an alternative to?: Crater is an open-source alternative to Flow. Other open-source alternatives to Flow include InvoicePlane, Invoice Ninja and VoiceInk.
Is Crater actively maintained?: The most recent commit to Crater was on 10 August 2024, and the latest release is 6.0.6, published on 6 March 2022. The project has 8.4k stars on GitHub.