RunwayDue vs Refrens

Refrens is the broader product, and on Indian statutory compliance it is not close. If what you need is an e-invoice with an IRN, an e-way bill in the same click and GSTR reports out of the system that raised the invoice, buy Refrens. RunwayDue has none of that, and this page is not going to imply otherwise.

RunwayDue is one narrow thing: contracts, the signatures on them, the invoices those contracts will produce, and a forward view that counts money you have signed for but not yet billed. If your revenue arrives in lumps (a quiet March, then two projects signing in the same week), that is the problem it was built around.

That is the comparison. The rest is detail.

At a glance

Refrens prices and plans checked 25 September 2026. RunwayDue's rupee prices are its own Indian list prices, not a conversion from dollars.

What each one is

Refrens' own suite, from its product page: invoicing, accounting, inventory management, a sales CRM and quotations, plus an invoice API and Shopify and Pabbly integrations. Its paid ladder adds capability in roughly that order: Accounts Lite (unlimited documents, recurring invoices, multi-currency), Accounts Pro (bank reconciliation, ledger syncing, P&L, balance sheet, cash flow), Workflows (approval workflows, vendor management, RFQ/RFI, KYB/KYC verification), Operations (inventory with batch and serial tracking, barcodes, multi-location, five warehouses), then a custom-quoted Services tier. The category question underneath this one, and how to test a tool against it, is in how to choose invoicing software when your revenue is not monthly.

RunwayDue is invoicing, proposals, contracts, e-signature and a set of books. Nothing else. It is US-first with a real Indian GST implementation underneath, which is the unusual combination and probably why you are reading this page at all.

GST: Refrens wins this, plainly

Both products calculate GST properly, so the honest split is not "arithmetic versus filing". Refrens does both halves.

Refrens' GST page describes CGST, SGST and IGST auto-calculated by place of supply, HSN and SAC support with GST rate auto-fill, and reports for GSTR-1, GSTR-3B and GSTR-9, plus GSTR-2B reconciliation with match, partial and missing flags. Its e-invoicing page describes bulk IRN generation, e-invoice cancellation, QR and IRN printing, e-invoices and e-way bills "with a single click", and states that Refrens is GSP authorised so it connects to the IRP. Its GST page adds automatic GSTIN verification, and its plan list puts e-invoices, e-way bills, the GSTR-1, 2B and 3B reports, GSTIN verification and its payment gateway on Accounts Pro, ₹15,000 a year before GST (checked 25 September 2026).

RunwayDue does the invoice and the books, and stops there:

• Your state against your client's decides CGST and SGST or IGST, and the invoice editor states the reason as a sentence rather than making you pick from a dropdown.
• GSTINs are checksum-validated when you save them, with the real algorithm: the weighted mod-36 sum is computed over the first fourteen characters and compared against the fifteenth, so a transposed digit is caught at entry rather than at filing.
• Typing a client's GSTIN fills in their state, because that field is what decides the tax.
• Reverse charge zeroes the tax and prints why. For a workspace that is GST registered with a GSTIN on file, a client outside India is treated as an export of service, no GST is added, and the invoice carries the declaration that the supply is meant for export under LUT or bond. A workspace that is not registered, or has no GSTIN yet, charges no GST on that invoice either, and it says so plainly instead of claiming an export it has not filed for.
• A tax invoice carries HSN/SAC per line, the per-slab tax summary, and the total in words with Indian digit grouping.
• Place of supply defaults to the buyer's registered state and can be overridden by hand, because special-case supplies differ.
• The tax summary report splits collected tax by rate with CGST, SGST and IGST columns, and paid tax by rate. That is the shape a return is filed in.

Both of them forecast. They forecast different things.

This is the one place the two products genuinely diverge, and it is more subtle than a feature list makes it look.

Refrens forecasts the top of the funnel. Its sales CRM tracks lead value, closure probability and weighted pipeline value across pipeline stages. In Refrens' own words, the forecast reflects the quality of active opportunities. That is a real forecast and it is a good one.

RunwayDue does that too, and then adds a layer underneath it. Its revenue engine keeps four, in descending order of certainty:

• Collected: payments that have landed.
• Outstanding: invoices sent and unpaid.
• Committed: billing rows on signed contracts that have not been invoiced yet.
• Pipeline: open proposals, weighted by a win probability you set on each one.

Committed is the layer worth understanding. When you write a contract you choose how it bills: one payment, monthly, quarterly, or milestones. For the first three RunwayDue generates the billing rows there and then, each with its own date and amount; milestones you date yourself, because there is nothing to infer. Once the contract is signed, every pending row is future revenue with a date on it. Raise an invoice from a row and that row flips to invoiced; the money moves from committed to outstanding when that invoice is sent, so it is never counted in both.

The forecast stacks the layers month by month, so the uncertain part stays visually distinct from the certain part. Beside it sits a figure called secured months: outstanding plus committed, divided by your trailing six-month average of collections. How far ahead you are already covered.

A studio that signs a six-month engagement in March and starts billing it in May has an empty invoice list in April and a perfectly healthy business. Telling those two situations apart is the whole reason the committed layer exists.

Signing, and what the signature actually is

Refrens signs documents too: its pricing page lists Simple Signatures and Digital Signatures on Accounts Lite, the digital ones with usage-based charges (checked 25 September 2026). The same page describes the simple ones as an uploaded, drawn or stamp-based signature on invoices, quotations and other documents, and the digital ones as "Certified eSign or DSC signing" (checked 29 September 2026). That is a certificate-based signature, which RunwayDue does not offer, so if a document needs a DSC, Refrens covers a case RunwayDue cannot.

E-signature is included in Pro at no extra charge per document; it draws on the same 250-document monthly allowance as everything else you send. On the free plan you can buy a single document outright instead of taking a subscription: ₹100 in India, and because the operating entity is Indian the checkout adds 18% GST as its own line, so ₹118. Packs of five, ten and twenty-five bring it down to ₹80, ₹70 and ₹60 a document. Prices checked September 2026.

What comes back is a signed PDF with a certificate of completion bound into it: each signer's name, the email address the private link went to, the time, their network address, their browser, their explicit agreement to sign electronically, and the SHA-256 fingerprint of the original file.

Be precise about what that is, and there is a fuller account in electronic signatures in India. It is an electronic signature with an audit trail, which is what ordinary commercial agreements need. It is not a digital signature certificate issued by a licensed Certifying Authority, and not an Aadhaar eSign. Before you send, the app lists what the law where you are leaves out. For India that is the First Schedule: negotiable instruments other than cheques, powers of attorney, trust deeds and wills, each now with its own exceptions, and no longer contracts for the sale or conveyance of immovable property, which a 2022 amendment removed. The legal note bound into the signed PDF follows the country the sending workspace is in, so a sender in the United States reads the ESIGN Act and their state's electronic transactions law rather than the Indian Act. If a document requires a DSC, use a licensed provider for that one. None of this is legal advice.

The free plans are shaped differently

Refrens' Basic plan is ₹0 and lists "Create 15 Documents", 2 users, one sales pipeline, five lead-capture forms and AI OCR on 15 documents a month.

One thing to check at signup, because Refrens' own pages do not agree: its pricing page says you can create 15 documents "for absolutely free" with no period attached, while its Indian free-invoicing page says "up to 15 business documents per year", and the US-English version of that page says "Free for 15 documents a year" and, further down, "you can create 20 free documents in a year" (all checked 25 September 2026). Three pages, three readings. Ask before you plan around a number.

RunwayDue's free plan is 3 clients, 5 invoices a month (60 a year) and 3 proposals or contracts a month (36 a year), for one person, with no expiry. The books, every report, reminders, recurring invoices and export are all Pro, and signing on Free is bought by the document, so Free covers invoices, proposals and contracts but not the books.

So the trade is legible: Refrens Free gives you a second user, and RunwayDue Free gives you an allowance that comes back every month, rather than 15 documents that last for good or for a year, depending on which Refrens page you read.

What it costs

Refrens' Indian ladder, checked August 2026: Basic ₹0, Accounts Lite ₹5,900 a year, Accounts Pro ₹15,000, Workflows ₹22,000, Operations ₹39,000, and a custom quote for Services. Its page states that all prices are exclusive of GST, so add 18% to each of those.

RunwayDue Pro is $15 a month billed yearly, or $17 monthly, with two people included and $6 a month for each person after that. One read-only accountant login is free on every plan, Free included, and does not count as a seat; a second one does. On Free it can read everything, but exporting needs Pro. An Indian workspace is billed in rupees at a separate rupee list price rather than a converted dollar one, also exclusive of GST, with the 18% added at checkout. That rupee list price is ₹1,200 a month for Pro billed yearly, or ₹1,400 monthly, with each extra person at ₹500 a month, and the pricing page shows it to everyone.

Where RunwayDue is plainly behind

Not hedged:

• No payment gateway on the invoices you send. Refrens integrates Cashfree for Indian businesses, so a client pays by UPI, card, wallet or net banking from the invoice itself and the invoice marks itself paid. RunwayDue has no equivalent: it takes cards at its own checkout and nothing on yours.
• No import of anything. No CSV, no bank feed. Expenses and bills are typed in, and reconciliation is a manual "mark reconciled" toggle. Refrens' Accounts Pro tier does bank reconciliation and ledger syncing.
• No mobile apps. Refrens publishes an official iOS app, and Capterra lists it as deployed on Web, Android and iPhone/iPad.
• No inventory. Refrens' inventory manages stock across purchases, sales, warehouses, batches, serial numbers, transfers and returns.
• No public API, no Zapier, no marketplace. Refrens publishes an invoice API you generate keys for, plus Shopify and Pabbly integrations.
• No procurement. RunwayDue stores vendors and bills and stops. Refrens' Workflows tier has approval workflows, vendor management, RFQ/RFI and KYB/KYC verification.
• One process on SQLite, which has not been tested at any scale beyond a small business.
• Launched in August 2026. No reviews, no community, no track record. Refrens holds a 4.9 average across 256 reviews on Capterra, checked August 2026, and that is a real thing to weigh against a product with none.

Buy Refrens if

You need the statutory documents. IRNs, e-way bills, GSTR-1 and 3B, GSTR-2B reconciliation. RunwayDue would leave you doing every one of them somewhere else, every month.

You sell goods. Stock, batches, serial numbers, warehouses, barcodes. RunwayDue has no inventory concept at all.

Your team invoices from phones. Field staff raising a bill on site is a mobile-app problem, and RunwayDue does not have an app.

You want procurement, sales and stock in one system. That is exactly what Workflows and Operations are for, and assembling the same thing around RunwayDue would be worse and cost more.

You want to plug invoicing into something you have built. The Refrens invoice API is a real one. RunwayDue has nothing to call.

Buy RunwayDue if

You sell project work, you sign before you invoice, and the question keeping you up is not what went out last week but what is already committed for the next six months. And you want the contract, the signature on it, the billing schedule it implies, the invoices that come off that schedule and the books they land in to be one set of records rather than five.

Frequently asked questions

Does Refrens generate e-invoices and e-way bills?

Yes. Refrens is GSP authorised and describes bulk IRN generation, e-way bills, GSTR-1, GSTR-3B and GSTR-9 reports and GSTR-2B reconciliation, and its plan list puts e-invoices, e-way bills and the GSTR-1, 2B and 3B reports on Accounts Pro, ₹15,000 a year before GST (checked 25 September 2026). RunwayDue has no IRN, no IRP connection, no e-way bill and no GSTR export, so if you are over the e-invoicing turnover threshold or you move goods, use Refrens or keep a filing tool beside RunwayDue.

Does Refrens calculate GST on invoices?

Yes. Refrens works out CGST, SGST and IGST by place of supply, supports HSN and SAC codes with GST rate auto-fill, and verifies GSTINs automatically on Accounts Pro and above (checked 25 September 2026). RunwayDue does the same calculation on every plan, checksum-validates GSTINs when you save them and stops at the invoice and the books; how the split works is explained in CGST and SGST, or IGST.

How many free documents does Refrens give you?

Refrens' own pages disagree. Its pricing page says you can create 15 documents "for absolutely free" with no period attached, its Indian free-invoicing page says "up to 15 business documents per year", and the US-English version of that page gives both 15 and 20 free documents a year (checked 25 September 2026), so ask before planning around a number. RunwayDue's free plan is 5 invoices a month (60 a year) and 3 proposals or contracts a month (36 a year), for one person, with no expiry.

Can clients pay a Refrens invoice online?

Yes. Refrens integrates the Cashfree payment gateway on Accounts Pro and above, so a client pays by UPI, card, wallet or net banking from the invoice itself and the invoice marks itself paid (checked 25 September 2026). RunwayDue does not process payments: clients pay by UPI or bank transfer to the details on your invoice, or through your own payment link, and you record the payment when it lands.

Does Refrens forecast revenue?

Yes, from the top of the funnel: its sales CRM tracks lead value, closure probability and weighted pipeline value across stages. RunwayDue weights open proposals too, and adds a layer underneath: billing rows on signed contracts that have not been invoiced yet, counted as committed revenue with their own dates, plus a secured-months figure for how far ahead you are already covered.

Should a services business choose Refrens or RunwayDue?

Refrens if you need the statutory documents, sell goods, invoice from phones, want procurement and stock in one system, or need an invoice API. RunwayDue if you sell project work, sign before you invoice, and want the contract, its signature, its billing schedule, the invoices that come off it and the books to be one set of records.