Stop Paying $100+/Month for Pay Stubs — Generate Yours for $19 Once

Every small business owner I know complains about Gusto. Not because it's bad — it's fine. But it's also $100+/month, for a tool they open maybe once a quarter to generate a single pay stub.

So I built one that costs $19. Once.

What I built

Paystub Generator is a browser-based pay stub generator. You fill in your employer info, employee details, pay period, wages, and tax deductions, and download a professional PDF — all in the same tab, all on your machine.

No signup. No account. No data leaves your browser.

The features that matter

• Professional PDF output — clean pay stub layout, employer/employee headers, earnings and deductions breakdown
• Live preview — see your pay stub as you type, formatted like a real pay stub
• Auto-calculation — federal tax, state tax, FICA (Social Security & Medicare) all calculated automatically
• Other deductions — health insurance, retirement, garnishments, whatever you need
• Dark mode — because payroll work doesn't stop at 5pm
• No watermark on Pro — $19 one-time, yours forever

Why it works

Gusto is a full payroll suite. It's amazing if you run a business with employees. It's overkill if you just need to generate a single pay stub for a 1099 contractor, a rental application, or your own records.

Paystub Generator does one thing: generate professional pay stubs. That focus means it's fast, simple, and doesn't nag you to upgrade your plan.

The PDF is generated client-side with pdf-lib — the same library used by some of the most popular PDF tools on the web. Your payroll data never touches a server.

The pricing

• Free: Watermarked PDF, full features
• Pro — $19 one-time: No watermark, priority support, future updates included

Compare that to Gusto at $100+/month. Even if you only use it for pay stubs, you're paying 60× more for a tool that does a hundred times as much as you need.

Try it

→ https://paystub.jackgreen.top — free, no signup

→ Compare with Gusto — side-by-side feature comparison

Built with

• Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS — no framework, no build step
• pdf-lib for PDF generation
• Express.js for the minimal server (serves static files + handles checkout redirects)
• Deployed on a VPS with NixOS declarative config

The whole thing is maybe 600 lines of HTML with inline CSS and JS. Sometimes the best architecture is the one you can read in a single tab.