People still search for shareware time tracking, and the search is not nostalgia. Shareware meant something specific: you got the program, you tried it, you paid once, and the copy was yours to keep and to run on your own machine. Nobody metered your staff. What that search is asking today is usually the same three things — pay once, run it ourselves, stop the meter.
Time tracking went the other way. The category is now sold per seat, per month, and the price moves with your headcount rather than with the software.
What the meters actually cost
Read on the vendors' own pricing pages on 7 September 2026. Where a vendor shows two billing states, both are here, because the annual figure is the one people quote and the monthly figure is the one people pay while they are deciding.
| Vendor | Published price | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Clockify | Free tier "Up to 5 users". Basic $3.99 per seat/month billed annually, $4.99 billed monthly. The $12.99/$15.99 line is the CAKE.com Bundle — Clockify Enterprise plus Pumble and Plaky — not a Clockify seat tier | 2026-09-07 |
| Toggl Track | "Free for a limited number of users". Starter $9 per user/month billed annually, $12 billed monthly. Premium $16 per user/month billed annually, $24 billed monthly; the first-year $14 and the $18 renewal footnote of 7 September are no longer on the page | 2026-10-11 |
| Harvest | Free tier of 1 seat and 2 projects. Teams $108 per seat, billed annually; the page advertises "Annual 20% off", so the annual figure is the discounted one | 2026-09-07 |
Two honest notes before any arithmetic. If your team is five people or fewer, Clockify's free tier wins on price, full stop — no one-time license beats zero. And a quoted seat price is the floor, not the bill: Harvest's own page says additional "invoices, projects, clients, and tasks are billed based on what you use".
Where paying once starts to matter
This is arithmetic on the figures in the table above, not a quote from anyone:
- Twenty people on Clockify Basic at the annual rate: 20 × $3.99 = $79.80 a month, every month.
- The same twenty on Toggl Starter: 20 × $9 = $180 a month.
- On Toggl Premium at the annual rate: 20 × $16 = $320 a month.
The meter is the product. That is the thing the shareware search is reaching for and not finding.
The one-time option, and what it does not do
Clockora is the shareware shape in current clothes: $69 once, PHP and MySQL, your own server, full source. Its own description of itself is deliberately narrow — hours by project, exact totals, approvals — and it says plainly: no invoicing. If you need invoices, Harvest does that and Clockora does not, and no arithmetic changes it.
Try the Clockora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
It also is not free to run. Self-hosted means somewhere to run PHP, and a backup you actually take. The trade is not "cheaper forever" — it is "the price stops moving when you hire".
If what you want is the whole shelf on one payment rather than one tool, Ownware OS is that. If you would rather read the general case before the specific one, the five-year math does the subscription-versus-license comparison without picking a product first.
Prices change. Every figure above is dated and linked to the page it came from, so you can check it in the time it takes to open a tab — which is the correct amount of trust to place in a table somebody else wrote.