Timesheet Software Without Per-Seat Pricing
Clockify charges $5.49 to $12.99 per seat per month, Harvest from $9 — which means your timesheet bill grows every time you hire. The per-seat math worked through honestly, including the free tier you might belong on, and the one-time alternative.
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 $5.49 / $7.99 / $11.99 / $12.99 per seat per month billed annually (higher billed monthly), and the free plan is capped at 5 users (their pricing page, checked 2026-08-04).
Harvest — paid plans start from $9/seat/month — $108 per seat, billed annually, with the upper tier from $14/seat ($168 per seat annually) (their pricing page, checked 2026-07-21).
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) | $5.49 | $54.90 | $1,976 |
| 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: $49, once, no per-seat anything. Hours by project, exact totals, an approval flow, CSV exports — plain PHP 8 and MySQL on hosting you already have. Ten staff or forty, the price is the number on this page.
Against 10 seats of Clockify's entry paid tier at $54.90/month, $49 breaks even in under a 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.
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 ($34, 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 amortise 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 licence 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 $12.99 per person per month at Clockify, $9 upward at Harvest, from their own pages. Under six staff, Clockify free wins. Above it, a $49 one-time timesheet breaks even against ten paid seats in under a 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
- Shift-scheduling software you buy once — the rota half of workforce tooling, priced the same way
- The Workforce Suite — leave, rota and timesheets together at $119 one-time
- The SaaS Price Observatory — Clockify, Harvest and 80 others, 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.