Conta started in 2009 as a free invoicing program built by three founders — a journalist, a developer and an accountant — frustrated with how hard it was to run a small business in Norway. It is operated by Conta AS (org 998 807 867) under parent Conta Group AS (org 816 909 252, a ~13-company group), headquartered in Stavanger with offices in Ålesund, Oslo and a development office in Brazil, plus remote developers worldwide (~67 employees). The hook is genuinely free, unlimited invoicing (Premium ~$10.49/mo billed annually unlocks reminders, recurring invoices, branding removal); optional paid add-ons cover bookkeeping, VAT/MVA filing via Altinn, bank sync (ZTL), payroll and EHF e-invoicing. 165,000–260,000 business users across ~10 countries (NO, ES, IE, AU, NZ, IN, ID, PH, ZA, US). Ownership is clean and local — founders plus Must Invest AS (Erik Must) since 2020, with no US venture or private-equity capital — and Conta Group also co-owns Norwegian email-marketing tool Mailmojo. The catch for sovereignty buyers is the substrate: customer invoices, files and databases live on Amazon AWS (EC2/S3/RDS/DynamoDB/Lambda), with SendGrid, Google, Sentry, New Relic and Meta/LinkedIn trackers in the stack. Conta keeps everything inside EU/EEA regions and mirrors a backup to Norwegian Jottacloud, but the host and a long tail of sub-processors are US-owned, so CLOUD Act exposure is material despite the Norwegian cap table.