Time tracking is the purest example of per-seat pricing, because the product's whole point is that everyone uses it. A timesheet only works if every member of staff fills it in — so every hire is a new seat, and every seat is a new line on the monthly bill, forever.
This article prices that honestly, in both directions.
What the incumbents charge, from their own pages
Clockify — paid plans run $3.99 / $5.49 / $7.99 / $11.99 / $12.99 per seat per month billed annually, and the monthly-billed ladder beside it is $4.99 / $6.99 / $9.99 / $14.99 / $15.99. The free plan is capped at "up to 5 users", and the top figure is the CAKE.com Bundle, which adds Plaky and Pumble to Clockify Enterprise rather than being a timesheet tier at all (their pricing page, read 3 September 2026, re-read 5 September 2026 — every figure unchanged).
Harvest — paid plans start from $9/seat/month — $108 per seat, billed annually, with the upper tier from $14/seat ($168 per seat annually). There is also a free plan, limited to one seat and two projects (their pricing page, read 3 September 2026, re-read 5 September 2026 — unchanged).
*The billing toggle on that page is labeled "Annual 20% off", and on the priced tiers we cannot find the twenty percent. Teams prints "$9 seat/month" against monthly billing and "$108 per seat, billed annually" against annual — and $108 divided by twelve is $9, the same rate. The Enterprise tier behaves identically at $14 and $168 (read 5 September 2026)*. We are reporting the two printed figures and the division between them, not a claim about what the badge is meant to cover — but if you were choosing annual billing at Harvest to capture an advertised discount, check your own quote before you commit to the year.
And Clockify prices a second class of seat that this guide has never mentioned, which is a gap worth closing because it works against our argument. Under "Limited Seats (Kiosk-only users)" the page charges $0.79, $1.19, $1.59 and $2.39 per month billed annually across Basic, Standard, Pro and Enterprise (read 5 September 2026). A person who only clocks in and out at a shared terminal costs a fifth of a full seat.
Both are capable, polished products. Neither number is the problem on its own. The problem is the multiplication.
The multiplication, worked
Take a 10-person team on the cheapest paid tiers:
| per seat/month | 10 seats, monthly | 10 seats, 3 years | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clockify (entry paid, annual billing) | $3.99 | $39.90 | $1,436 |
| Harvest (entry, annual billing) | $9.00 | $90.00 | $3,240 |
Two things about that table are worth saying out loud.
First, the bill scales with headcount, not with value. The eleventh employee does not make time tracking eleven-elevenths more useful to you — but they make it more expensive by exactly one seat.
*Second, the number in the "3 years" column buys you the right to keep using* the tool, not the tool.** Stop paying and the tracking stops. The five-year version of this argument, with the owning side priced honestly — setup time, hosting, maintenance — is in the five-year math.
The free tier you might belong on
Clockify's free plan covers up to 5 users, and if your team fits inside it, use it and stop reading. We say the same thing about free tiers in every category we cover: a free product that genuinely fits is a better deal than anything anyone sells you, including us.
The moment it stops fitting is the sixth hire — which is precisely when the per-seat meter starts, on every seat including the first five.
The one-time alternative
Clockora is a self-hosted staff timesheet: $69, once, no per-seat anything. Hours by project, exact totals, an approval flow, CSV exports — plain PHP 8.1+ (tested on PHP 8.3) and MySQL on hosting you already have. Ten staff or forty, the price is the number on this page.
Try the Clockora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
Against 10 seats of Clockify's entry paid tier at $39.90/month, $69 breaks even in the second month. Against Harvest at $90/month for the same team, faster still. Even loading the owning side honestly — an hour of setup, a few euros of shared hosting a month — the break-even stays inside the first quarter. (An earlier version of this sentence said $54.90, which is ten seats of Standard at $5.49, not of the entry tier. The table beside it was right and the sentence was wrong; it is corrected here.)
Now run it against the kiosk rate, because that is the comparison a shop floor should actually make. One full Basic seat for whoever administers the thing, plus nine kiosk-only seats, is $3.99 + 9 × $0.79 = $11.10 a month — $399.60 over three years. A $69 license still wins, but it now takes until month seven rather than month two. If your staff genuinely only need to punch in at a shared screen, Clockify is far cheaper than the headline ladder suggests, and any comparison that quotes only the full-seat price — including the earlier version of this one — is overstating the gap.
And here is what Clockora does not do, stated plainly: it does not invoice. Hours become totals, not bills — if you need tracked time to flow into client invoices the way Harvest does it, pair it with Invora ($99, also one-time) or stay with Harvest, whose time-to-invoice pipeline is genuinely its strong suit. It also will not match the incumbents' mobile-app polish; it is a web app your staff open on any phone browser, not an app-store product with GPS and geofencing. If field-crew GPS clock-in is the requirement, that is a different product category and a per-seat vendor may earn its fee.
Who should stay with the incumbents
- Teams of five or fewer — Clockify's free tier. No contest, and it is not close.
- Time that must become client invoices automatically — Harvest's pipeline is mature; weigh the $108/seat/year against the admin hours it saves and it can genuinely win.
- Field crews needing GPS or kiosk clock-in with offline sync — funded mobile engineering costs money and per-seat vendors amortize it well.
Who should own instead
- Teams past the free-tier cap whose need is the timesheet itself — hours, projects, approvals, exports. That is the whole job for most small businesses, and it does not justify a per-head subscription.
- Anyone who resents auditing seats every quarter — removing leavers, adding starters, wondering why the bill went up. A one-time license has no seat audit.
- Businesses that want the hours data in their own database — staff working-time records are personal data, and where they live is worth deciding deliberately.
The short version
Per-seat timesheet pricing means your bill is a headcount tax: $5.49 to $11.99 per person per month at Clockify, $9 upward at Harvest, from their own pages. Under six staff, Clockify free wins. Above it, a $69 one-time timesheet breaks even against ten paid seats in the second month — as long as you are honest about what you are not getting: invoicing, GPS, and somebody else's on-call rota.
Next steps
- Clockora — the demo is ungated; fifteen minutes there beats the rest of this article
- The workforce stack, bought once — the timesheet beside the rota, leave, onboarding and training registers, and why none of them does payroll
- Shift-scheduling software you buy once — the rota half of workforce tooling, priced the same way
- The Workforce Suite — leave, rota, timesheets, onboarding and the training matrix together at $249 one-time
- The SaaS Price Observatory — Clockify, Harvest and every other tracked vendor, quoted from their own pages with dates
Competitor prices quoted verbatim from each vendor's own pricing page on the dates shown. Break-even arithmetic is computed from those published figures; your team size moves it, so run your own line.