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Cushion — A forecasting app for freelancers, get better insights
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Mark Sandeno
Looks great. Any plans to allow for teams to benefit from this? I know that we (as an 8 person dev team) have very similar challenges as a freelancer. We've cobbled together a tool that works using Zapier and Cyfe but it'd be great to have this kind of functionality for more than one person.
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@markgustav Thanks, Mark! Teams are on the roadmap for sure, but I'm not sure how soon—I want to get everything right with solo freelancers first. I do have a few dozen teams using Cushion with one person managing the account, but if you send out a dozen invoices a week, the visual might be overwhelming. Oddly enough, a manager of a 600-person team uses Cushion to plan potential projects with his manager, so it might work for you, too
I was involved briefly on the Beta for this. It's a crazy beautiful webapp with a lot of potential. Congrats on the launch!
Cushion's blog is a `/feed` fixture in my personal Slack #learn channel. Good stuff. http://cushionapp.com/blog/
Just tried Cushion and it activates/motivates me to chase new projects, add them in the app and earn dem $$$! Great, great work. Also loving the documented process in the Journal.
I'd love to track my monthly expenses (like on the Expense page) and view them aside my income. That would give the complete overview of everything. Is this something you've considered adding later? What are your future plans?
@paddy_mckee Same! I've found that I want to fill up my income graph quicker and fill in open spots in my schedule timeline.
Expenses are definitely on the shortlist of new features to add. At first, I was hesitant, but now after trying a dozen other services to track expenses, I desperately need them in Cushion.
Interesting overview of the cost of building the service (excluding the spent time etc.). http://cushionapp.com/expenses/
Haven't seen that many services open up their cost structure.
Did you integrate with external services to get data for the visualization? Could similar visualization used with Harvest expenses data? It would allow quick overview of related costs in projects.
@autiomaa The expenses page is all manual at the moment. I store the monthly costs in a spreadsheet and convert it to JSON for the website to render. I'd love to automate this process and an expenses feature within Cushion seems like it could do the job.
Here's the spreadsheet in case you were curious: https://docs.google.com/spreadsh...
Hi. I'm a freelance designer/dev and have always had trouble planning and managing the year. I constantly take on too much work and never think to take a break. I built Cushion to bring a calm to this roller coaster ride of freelancing by providing better insight into the work I take on and the clients I work with. After 10 months in a paid beta, Cushion is finally ready for the rest of the freelance world to try out.
@destroytoday Awesome app and very thoughtfully designed. I'm not freelancing anymore but would highly recommend to others if they are.
Congrats on the launch Jonnie! I've been following along with your blog posts here and there (thanks for sharing so openly!) but hadn't given Cushion a try yet. Just taken it for a spin and it looks great, definitely a valuable tool for freelancers.
I do projects in multiple currencies, and I found that for example a project in USD didn't show up in my total/budget area - only the project in GBP, so it wasn't a true reflection of potential earnings. Do you have any plans to account for this type of scenario?
The interface and interaction work is great by the way!
@mikeharmer Thanks, Mike! With conversion rates fluctuating constantly, there wasn't an accurate way to implement the budget graph with combined currencies. I plan to add a "convert" button next to currency fields, so you can convert amounts to your default currency, so hopefully that will help others who deal with income from varying currencies.
@destroytoday sounds good! Even some kind of 'around this much' conversion would be awesome, just so it's represented in the totals.
Any plans to go deeper into the timeline aspect? E.g. a project may span 2 months but only require 6 weeks of active work to account for feedback, waiting for assets etc. so another small project could fit in that downtime. Or a project may only require an hour or two a day, but is given the same prominence as a project that requires the full day, so could be hard to judge availability.
Looking forward to trying it out further!
@mikeharmer Take a look at project blocks. You can create them from the scheduling view of an individual project. With project blocks, you can visualize a span of time and specify its workload (1-40 hours/week or 1-5 days/week). You can also label them if you want them to represent phases, like sketches, revisions, and finals, etc. Here's a deeper look into them: http://cushionapp.com/journal/de...
This app looks great. We work with freelancers, and after meeting a few, I always hear that they've taken too many gigs, or they can't keep track of their rates. Everything is colourfully highlighted and very clear. Is there a feature to tell freelancers how much they should be getting paid in that industry, or how much time they should be spending on each assignment in order to deliver their content on time? I usually look through many articles to see how much I should be getting paid, but it differs from person to person and the progression of the industry.
I love this but I wish it worked on my phone too.
Pros:Flexible, freelancer focussed, full featured
Cons:Doesn’t work on smaller devices, doesn’t sync with new FreshBooks
LOVE this app! Just got the pro version. Love the constant upgrades and how easy the app is to use.
Jonnie, have you considered doing a project management (web)app based on your cushion UX? It feel that would be a killer app! I'd love to see you tackle a Basecamp competitor.