Search for a self-hosted leave tracker and you will find that almost nobody sells one.
That is not an exaggeration for effect. We searched twice, phrased two different ways — once as "Timetastic alternative self hosted" and once as "self hosted staff leave PTO holiday tracker" — on 1 August 2026. Both times the results were hosted products wearing the phrase, and one of the leading pages had last been updated in 2019. Nothing genuinely self-hosted came back.
Leave tracking is not a hard problem. It is a list of people, a list of days, and some arithmetic. And yet the entire category has settled on charging you every month, per person, indefinitely, for that arithmetic.
This is a cost breakdown of that decision. Every price below comes from the vendor's own pricing page, read on the date shown, and linked so you can check it.
What Timetastic costs
From Timetastic's pricing page (read 2026-07-21, re-read 3 September 2026):
| Plan | Published price |
|---|---|
| Business | $1.50 per user per month |
| Pro | $2.50 per user per month |
| Rota & Time Clock | $5.50 per user per month (on the page at the 3 September re-read; the two figures above are unchanged) |
(All three held on a 5 September 2026 re-read. That reading also found the page serving dollars with no currency control, while its own structured data still carried 1.20 and 2.00 GBP — so a UK reader and a reader elsewhere are quoted different numbers for the same product. What currency are you actually billed in works that through.)
There is no free tier.
That is a genuinely low headline number, and it is worth saying so plainly: $1.50 is not a rip-off. It is the number that makes the decision feel too small to think about — which is exactly why the decision never gets revisited.
The arithmetic nobody runs
| Team size | Basic ($1.50) | Pro ($2.50) |
|---|---|---|
| 10 people, per month | $15.00 | $25.00 |
| 10 people, 3 years | $540 | $900 |
| 25 people, per month | $37.50 | $62.50 |
| 25 people, 3 years | $1,350 | $2,250 |
| 50 people, 3 years | $2,700 | $4,500 |
Nobody ever decided to spend $2,250 on leave tracking. They decided to hire twenty-five people — which was the right decision — and the leave bill followed them there quietly, one payroll addition at a time.
That is what per-seat pricing does. It converts a good outcome into a cost you never explicitly approved.
What Vacation Tracker costs — and the part that catches small teams
From Vacation Tracker's pricing page (read 2026-09-03), quoted verbatim:
"EUR 2 / month — EUR 50 minimum — Billed monthly" … "EUR 4 / month — EUR 100 minimum"
(The page serves EUR to EU visitors; we are quoting the currency it served rather than converting it, because a conversion rate we invented would be exactly the kind of uncited number this site refuses to publish.)
A 5 September 2026 re-read recorded two minimums, and only one of them survived a closer read. The page shows "$50 minimum" on the Core card while monthly billing is selected — that stands. We also recorded "$25 minimum", at $1 per user, once yearly billing is selected. Read again on 26 September 2026, the yearly Core card renders "€1.83 per user / month" and "€550 minimum", billed yearly, and the page's own pricing script sets its first yearly bucket at 550 for up to twenty-five users. The $1 and $25 are still in the page's served HTML — as placeholder text that the script replaces when the page loads, which is where our earlier reading came from. A minimum belongs to a billing state as much as a price does, and a placeholder is not a price.
The page also served us US dollars on that date, where the 3 September reading was served euros. On 26 September it rendered euros again; its pricing script states that the currency symbol is chosen by the visitor's location over one set of numbers. The euro figures below keep their own date; we have not converted anything, for the reason given in the note beneath them.
Read the minimum, not the per-user price. At EUR 2 per user, that EUR 50 floor is not reached until twenty-five people. Below twenty-five, the per-user price is decorative:
| Team size | What the per-user price implies | What you actually pay |
|---|---|---|
| 5 people | EUR 10 | EUR 50 — five times the advertised rate |
| 10 people | EUR 20 | EUR 50 — two and a half times |
| 20 people | EUR 40 | EUR 50 |
| 25 people | EUR 50 | EUR 50 — the floor finally matches |
A five-person business pays the same as a twenty-five-person business. Over three years, any team under twenty-five is paying EUR 1,800 for leave tracking, regardless of how small it is.
On yearly billing the floor becomes a year's charge, and the saving is small. With yearly billing selected the Core card reads €1.83 per user / month with a €550 minimum (read 26 September 2026), so a team below the crossover pays EUR 1,650 over three years rather than EUR 1,800. The crossover itself does not move — the first yearly bucket covers up to twenty-five users — so the shape of the trap is identical and its depth barely changes.
The toggle's label, checked against its figures. The billing toggle is labeled "Save ~ 10% yearly". At the floor, yearly billing is €550 against twelve months at €50, which is €600 — a saving of about 8%, close to what the label says (read 26 September 2026). An earlier version of this paragraph said the switch halves both numbers and so could not be a ten percent saving; that rested on the placeholder figures above, and it was wrong. We are reporting the printed label and the printed figures and letting the arithmetic sit between them, as we did with the discount badges at Harvest and Calendly.
There is nothing dishonest about a minimum — Vacation Tracker publishes it clearly on its own pricing page, which is more than many vendors do. But if you are a small team who chose a per-person tool because you are small, the per-person logic stops applying to you before you begin.
What the alternative costs
Leavora is a self-hosted staff leave and PTO tracker — PHP and MySQL, installed on your own hosting, bought once.
Try the Leavora demo ↗Live, on sample data, no sign-up.
From its product page (read 2026-08-20): $99.00, one time, for unlimited staff. It is also one of the five products in the Workforce Suite.
| 3-year cost | |
|---|---|
| Timetastic Business, 10 people | $540 |
| Timetastic Pro, 25 people | $2,250 |
| Vacation Tracker, any team under 25 | EUR 1,800 |
| Leavora | $99 + your hosting |
Against Vacation Tracker's minimum, the license costs less than one month of the subscription.
The honest part: what self-hosting actually costs you
A comparison that stops at the license fee is a sales pitch. Three real costs, and two of them are not money.
Hosting. Leavora is plain PHP and MySQL. If your business already runs a website — and most businesses with twenty-five staff do — adding a small PHP app to that hosting is frequently a marginal cost of zero, because you are already paying for the server. If you have no hosting, you will need some, and you should price that from an actual provider rather than from an article. For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read on 10 August 2026 from the price API behind its web-hosting and cloud pricing pages — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
We are not putting an invented hosting figure in the table. The honest form of the argument does not need one: the gap between $99 and EUR 1,800 is not closed by any realistic hosting bill.
Your time, at install. Budget an hour the first time, including reading. If uploading files or clicking through a hosting control panel is somebody else's job at your company, it is their hour, not yours.
Your time, forever. When Timetastic has a problem, Timetastic fixes it while you sleep. When your server has a problem, you fix it. Backups are yours. PHP upgrades are yours.
For a leave tracker, that risk is unusually low — if the tool is down for two hours, nobody's holiday is canceled and no money moves. That is precisely why leave tracking is one of the better candidates for owning outright, and why we would not make the same argument about your payment processor.
Where the subscriptions are genuinely better
Integrations. Vacation Tracker's entire pitch is that it lives inside Slack, Teams or Google Workspace — requests and approvals happen where your team already is. If your staff will not open a separate web app to book a day off, that integration is not a luxury, it is the product. A self-hosted PHP tool does not replace it.
Mobile polish. A funded product amortizes app development across every customer. Assume a one-time license does not match it, because it does not.
Somebody else on call. For any business where an outage is an emergency, paying monthly to make it somebody else's emergency is rational. Leave tracking is rarely that business — but you should decide that, not us.
And what Leavora explicitly is not. From its own FAQ, quoted rather than paraphrased:
"Is Leavora payroll?" — "No — it tracks leave entitlement, requests, approvals, and balances only. It never calculates wages, touches cards or bank rails, or initiates a payment, so it has zero payroll and zero payment surface."
If you want leave, attendance and pay in one system, this is the wrong tool and you should stop reading.
What it does do, precisely
Also from the product page (read 2026-08-01), because vague feature claims are worthless:
- Balances are exact by construction. "Leave is stored in integer centidays (a hundredth of a day), so half-days and monthly accrual are precise and a full year's accrual lands exactly on the entitlement." The page points to the shipped test suite, which you can run yourself.
- Fiscal leave years work. "The leave year is configurable (calendar or a fiscal start such as April 1), and carryover is capped at that boundary." If your year starts in April, this is not an afterthought.
- Half-days and public holidays are handled. "Requests can be half-days, and a company holiday list plus your configured weekend are excluded from every working-day count."
- Vendor risk is addressed directly. "You get the full PHP source and your data lives in one database you own — nothing phones home, nothing expires."
That last one deserves a sentence. Every tool in this comparison holds a record of who was off sick and when. A self-hosted tool keeps that in a database on your own server. Whether that matters to you depends on your jurisdiction and your appetite — but it is a real difference, not a marketing line.
The switch path
1. Try the demo first. The Leavora demo opens already signed in on sample data, with no sign-up and no password, and it resets itself. Twenty minutes there will settle this faster than the rest of this article.
2. Export your current balances. You need people, entitlements, days already taken this year, and your public holiday list. Check what your current vendor's export actually contains in their own help documentation before you give notice — the time to find a gap is while the account still works.
3. Install on hosting you already have. Plain PHP and MySQL.
4. Run both for one full leave cycle. Not a week — a cycle that includes a real request, a real approval, a half-day, and a public holiday. This is the step people skip and then regret.
5. Cancel only after the balances match. Reconcile every person's remaining entitlement against the old system before you turn it off. If a number disagrees, find out why before you cancel, not after.
The short version
If leave requests must happen inside Slack, or leave and payroll must be one system, stay where you are — that integration is what you are paying for and it is worth it.
If what you need is a record of who is off, when, and how much they have left, then: a ten-person team is looking at $540 over three years on Timetastic Business, and any team under twenty-five is looking at EUR 1,800 on Vacation Tracker, for arithmetic that does not change.
The alternative is a one-time license and hosting you may already be paying for — and the whole category is thin enough that a search for it comes back empty.
Next steps
- Open the live Leavora demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Leavora product page and license options
- The workforce stack, bought once — leave beside the rota, timesheet, onboarding and training registers
- The minimum spend — Vacation Tracker's floor among six others
- Self-hosted workforce software — the category
- The SaaS Price Observatory — every tracked vendor, priced from its own page and dated
Every price in this article is quoted from the vendor's own published pricing page with the date it was read. If a price has changed since, the vendor's page is authoritative, not ours.