Landing page: Turn signed contracts into paid invoices, all in one calm workspace.
Sign in: Pick up right where you left off. Your workspace is waiting.
Create workspace: Set up your account and workspace in under a minute.
Overview: Your receivables, collections and expected cash at a glance.
Clients: Keep your clients’ details and what each one owes in one list.
New contract: Capture the client, value and dates of a new agreement.
Contract detail: See every milestone, its due date and what’s still left to bill.
Invoice detail: Review a draft invoice, then send it to your client through PayPal.
Invoices list: Every invoice in one place, with what’s paid and what remains.
Cash flow: See what’s collected, what’s scheduled and what’s running late.
Documents: Store contracts and files, verified and ready to use as evidence.
Reports: Track collections and client balances, then export them as CSV.
Dispute case: Review the case, gather your proof and respond through PayPal.
Dispute conversation: Read the full buyer and merchant thread in one clear timeline.
Buyer’s dispute view on PayPal: See the case thread and the evidence Settle sent to the buyer.

Settle: From Contract to Cash, Intelligently

The Inspiration

Winning a client is a milestone for every freelancer. But getting paid for the work is often an entirely different battle.

Behind every successful freelance project lies a chain of responsibilities: understanding contracts, tracking milestones, generating invoices, following up on delayed payments, and resolving disputes. These tasks are scattered across different platforms, forcing freelancers to spend valuable time managing financial operations instead of focusing on their craft.

We believe this experience should be different.

What if a freelancer could simply upload a contract and have an intelligent agent take care of the journey from contractual commitments to payment collection?

That idea became Settle.

What We Built

Settle is an AI-powered contract-to-cash agent designed for freelancers, consultants, and agencies. It connects contract intelligence, project milestones, invoicing, payment tracking, and dispute management into one unified platform.

Using Gemini AI, Settle understands uploaded contracts and Statements of Work (SOWs), extracting client information, payment terms, milestones, amounts, and deadlines. It transforms these details into actionable project timelines and helps users stay on top of their financial commitments.

But understanding a contract is only the beginning.

Through the PayPal Invoicing API, Settle connects contractual milestones with real invoicing workflows. Users can generate and manage invoices, while PayPal webhooks help synchronize payment-related events and invoice statuses. Settle also helps identify overdue payments and automate follow-ups, reducing the burden of manually chasing clients.

We take this further with AI-powered dispute assistance. When disagreements arise, Settle helps users analyze dispute conversations, understand claims, identify missing evidence, detect inconsistencies, and prepare structured responses. Instead of navigating a stressful process alone, freelancers have an intelligent assistant to help them make informed decisions.

Settle also provides cash-flow visibility, helping professionals understand expected payments, overdue invoices, and upcoming financial commitments.

How We Built It

We approached Settle as a distributed financial operations platform rather than a collection of disconnected features.

Gemini AI powers contract understanding and AI-assisted dispute analysis. PayPal provides the invoicing infrastructure and payment event integration. Our backend, built with Node.js and Fastify, manages business logic and integrations, while PostgreSQL provides persistent data storage.

Redis and BullMQ handle asynchronous workflows such as document processing, AI tasks, payment synchronization, and scheduled reminders. Backblaze B2 provides private document storage, and React powers the user-facing application.

One of our key architectural decisions was to separate time-consuming operations from API requests. This allows longer-running AI and background workflows to execute asynchronously without blocking the user experience.

Challenges We Faced

One of our biggest challenges was translating unstructured contractual information into reliable financial workflows. Extracting an amount or deadline is not enough; that information must flow correctly into milestones, invoices, and payment schedules.

Integrating PayPal also required us to understand the complete invoicing lifecycle, API authentication, invoice statuses, webhook verification, and asynchronous payment updates. Ensuring that external payment events were reflected accurately in our application required careful backend design.

Another challenge was making AI useful in sensitive financial workflows. An AI-generated response should never invent evidence or present assumptions as facts. We therefore focused on grounding AI assistance in available contracts, payment records, and dispute information while keeping users in control of important actions.

Building these capabilities taught us to think beyond individual API integrations and design reliable, connected systems.

What We Learned

Through Settle, we learned that building a meaningful AI product requires much more than connecting an LLM to an application.

The real value comes from combining AI with structured data, reliable integrations, distributed processing, and workflows that solve genuine problems.

We gained hands-on experience with Gemini, PayPal APIs, webhook-driven architectures, background job processing, document intelligence, and AI-assisted decision-making.

Most importantly, we learned to design around the user's entire journey rather than solving isolated problems.

Our Vision

We envision a future where freelancers no longer have to become accountants, payment collectors, and dispute managers just to run an independent business.

Settle aims to become the intelligent financial operations layer for the independent workforce: understanding agreements, coordinating payment workflows, anticipating potential issues, and helping professionals get paid with greater confidence.

Because the value of great work shouldn't end when the work is delivered. It should end when the freelancer gets paid.