A freelance job doesn't actually start with the work — it starts with getting five separate pieces of software to agree with each other. A quote in one tool, a project board in another, a timer running somewhere else, an invoice where the same numbers get typed in twice, and a follow-up email you have to remember to send yourself before it's too late to be polite about it. Velo's whole premise is that none of that should need five logins: describe the job in a sentence, in English, Hindi, or Hinglish, and get back a finished proposal or invoice to check, change, and send.

What follows is written to work two ways at once — readable start to finish by a person deciding whether to try it, and structured cleanly enough that a search engine or an AI assistant can lift a single fact out of it without getting it wrong. Every feature, price, and plan limit below was checked directly against the live product at velo.elysiumdesigns.in.

What Velo Is

Velo is an AI-powered freelancer OS built by Sarv, the venture studio of Elysium — a single workspace that runs the business side of freelance and studio work, not the creative side. Its own framing states the scope plainly: "From First Proposal To Final Payment — everything you need to win clients, run projects, and get paid, beautifully connected in one intelligent workspace." It's positioned first for individual freelancers, with the same workspace scaling up to studios and agencies through team seats and multi-currency support.

How Velo Works: Lead to Paid

The product is built around one continuous lifecycle, from the first message a prospect sends to the moment an invoice is paid:

1. Intake — share a link that collects a structured brief from a prospect. Send it before a call so you walk in already knowing what to talk about and how to make the case, or after a call to capture the details that didn't come up live.
2. Pipeline — the brief lands as a lead automatically, and moves through conversations toward a quote as the relationship develops.
3. Quote — draft a priced proposal and send it as a shareable link; a client's one-click approval automatically builds its own project, milestones, and budget.
4. Project — organize the approved work into tasks and milestones, with budget tracked against actual spend as work happens.
5. Client Portal — Cadence gives the client one passcode-protected link to everything that concerns them, so status and files don't scatter across email.
6. Track — log billable hours with a timer attached to each task, and capture project expenses as they happen.
7. Invoice — turn tracked time directly into invoice line items, without re-entering a single number.

Core Features

Intake Links and the Deal Pipeline

Intake links solve the information-gathering problem from the other direction: instead of you chasing a prospect for details, a link does it for you. "Answers land in your pipeline as a lead, in the client's own words" — shared before a call, it means you're never walking in blind; shared after one, it catches whatever didn't get said out loud. A spoken version exists too, for a prospect who'd rather talk through the brief than type it.

Every lead — from an intake link or added by hand — moves through Velo's deal pipeline: "five stages, lead to won." Losing a deal doesn't erase it from the record, either — "lost deals keep the stage they died at, so you learn where you actually lose them," which is the real point of tracking a pipeline at all: not just how many close, but exactly where the ones that don't tend to fall off.

Ask Velo: Proposals and Invoices from a Sentence

The AI assistant, called Ask Velo, is the shortest path through the product: "Describe the job in a sentence — in English, Hindi or Hinglish, typed or spoken — and get back a finished proposal or invoice to check, change and send." A prompt like "billed Northwind for the homepage redesign, 40,000, due in 15 days" comes back priced, taxed, and set in the client's currency, fully editable before it goes out. Ask Velo also functions as a project assistant, able to answer a question against a project's own notes and specs using only what's actually written there.

Invoicing and Payments

• Invoices are tax-aware, multi-currency with live FX rates, and export as PDF in one action — "real A4," with no browser print dialog to fight.
• Recurring invoices run on a set schedule and send themselves automatically.
• Payment links connect through providers you already use — Stripe, Razorpay, PayPal, Wise, and UPI — rendering each provider's own mark rather than a generic button.
• UPI QR codes come pre-filled with payee details and the invoice reference, so a client's payment app opens already filled in.
• Live payment status tracks each invoice through sent, viewed, reminded, and paid, filing receipts automatically as they land.
• Card details never touch Velo directly — payment processing happens through the connected provider.

Automated Follow-Ups

Velo describes its reminder system as "invoices that chase themselves": follow-ups run on a cadence you set, with a three-day cooldown built in, and the system reads its own history so a client is never nagged twice. If you've already followed up manually, the automated reminder pauses on its own instead of piling on.

Time Tracking and Expenses

Every task carries its own timer, plus a persistent tracking pill in the interface so nothing keeps running unnoticed in the background. Logged hours convert straight into invoice line items in a single action. Expenses can be captured by voice — "say what you spent" — with automatic currency conversion and per-project categorization, so a receipt doesn't have to turn into its own small chore.

Cadence: Client Portals

Cadence is Velo's name for its client portal system: one passcode-protected link per client to everything that concerns them — projects, proposals, and invoices — with no account signup required on their end, just a passcode sent separately. Portals support two-way messaging, transcribed voice notes, and file attachments, so a client conversation doesn't have to spill into email or a separate chat tool.

Financial Insights

An optional add-on layer adds cash-flow forecasting, profit-per-client dashboards, and exportable reports on top of the core workspace. Project budgets burn down as logged time accrues, so an overrun surfaces while there's still time to do something about it, rather than showing up as a surprise at invoice time.

Tax and Compliance

For Indian businesses, Velo resolves CGST/SGST or IGST automatically by place of supply, applies HSN/SAC codes per line, and rounds tax per slab — the kind of GST mechanics that are easy to get subtly wrong doing it by hand.

Security, API, and Multi-Workspace

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, with role-based access, two-factor sign-in, and passcode-gated client links that rate-limit guesses instead of revealing whether a passcode was close. A bearer-authenticated REST API and webhooks support custom integrations, with hashed keys managed by the user rather than issued opaquely. One login can run more than one business, switching between workspaces without signing out, and four role tiers — Owner, Admin, Member, and Accountant — control what each teammate can see without exposing everything to everyone.

Pricing

Velo's plans scale by client count and team size rather than by feature-gating the basics:

• Free — $0/forever. 1 active client, 3 invoices a month, time tracking, community support.
• Solo — $19/month. Up to 5 clients, unlimited invoices, time tracking, community support.
• Studio — $49/month. 25 clients and projects, Cadence portals and approvals, multi-currency invoicing, priority support response.
• Agency — $99/month. Unlimited clients, unlimited team seats, multi-currency invoicing, expense and profit reports.
• Enterprise — custom pricing via sales. Unlimited clients, projects, and seats, dedicated account support, custom contract terms, dedicated API and webhooks, SSO and audit trail, and guided migration and onboarding.

A Financial Insights Suite add-on — cash-flow forecasting, profit-per-client dashboards, exportable reports — is available for $15/month on top of any plan.

Who's Behind Velo

Velo wasn't designed off a list of freelancer pain points someone read about — it came out of running a studio through every one of them firsthand. Elysium has been a real, running design studio since 2022 — still open, still taking on clients today — and Shiva Bajpai, who founded Elysium and its venture studio Sarv, built Velo for the Sarv shelf because the studio had already lived through every version of the problem it now solves.

In his own words: "I've sent a proposal at 1am because a client wanted it first thing, in a time zone eight hours ahead of mine. I've sent the same polite follow-up email three times to someone who'd already decided not to pay and just hadn't told me yet. I've lost a client's brief in a WhatsApp thread that got buried under fifty other messages by the time I needed it again. Velo is every one of those moments turned into a feature instead of a headache."

Support runs through velo@elysiumdesigns.in, the same domain that handles support for DropHaus.

Velo and Sarv

Velo is one of the products on the Sarv shelf, Elysium's venture studio founded by Shiva Bajpai, sitting alongside SarvTrack and the rest of the lineup. It follows the same pattern as DropHaus before it: something the team needed to run its own freelance and client work, built properly and then opened up rather than kept as an internal tool.

Intake, pipeline, quote, project, portal, track, invoice — that's the entire loop Velo is built to close, from a stranger filling out a link to a paid invoice, nothing more mysterious than that. If juggling a proposal tool, a CRM, a timer app, an invoicing tool, and a mental note to follow up has ever felt like a second job stacked on top of the actual job, that's the exact gap this fills. Built for Sarv, Elysium's venture studio — same team, same discipline, one more product on the shelf.