Time tracking pricing compared: what six tools really cost
The number on a time tracker's pricing page is usually the first-year, annual-billing, no-usage-charges price for a seat you have not added yet. It is a real number and it is not what you will pay. Toggl Track Premium is $14 per license per month for a year and then $18. Harvest's Flex billing adds usage charges on top of the per-seat rate, and new accounts do not see them until the second renewal. Neither fact is hidden, and neither is on the page you land on.
Below is what six commonly compared tools actually cost, with the renewal rates and billing mechanics that decide the real bill. Everything here was checked against vendor documentation on August 24, 2026. Pricing changes often in this category, so treat every figure as needing a same-day check before you sign anything.
Harvest: the per-seat price is only half the bill
Harvest runs two plans, Teams and Enterprise, and each can be billed two different ways. That second choice is the one that matters and it is easy to miss.
- Unlimited - a fixed price per seat. Predictable, and what most people assume they are buying.
- Flex - a lower per-seat rate plus usage-based charges, calculated from your previous billing period's activity: active projects, active clients, active tasks and invoicing. Each plan includes a free usage allowance and you pay for what goes above it.
List pricing sits around $12 per user per month, dropping to roughly $10.80 if you pay for the year up front, which is a 20 percent annual discount.
The detail worth carrying into a budget: on Flex, usage charges for a new account begin at the second paid renewal. So the first bills look clean, the pattern establishes itself, and the number changes later for reasons that have nothing to do with headcount. If your work is many small client projects rather than a few large ones, that is exactly the shape that accumulates active projects and clients.
Harvest's free tier exists and is narrow: one active person and two active projects. It is a trial with no clock rather than a plan to run a business on. We have written before about how Harvest's pricing has moved, which is worth reading if you are renewing rather than starting.
Toggl Track: the renewal is the number to plan around
This is the clearest example on the page of a price that is accurate and misleading at the same time.
Toggl Track Premium, billed annually, is $14 per license per month for the first year and renews at $18 per license per month. That is roughly a 29 percent increase, arriving at a moment when switching is hardest because everyone's habits have settled.
For a ten person team that is the difference between $1,680 and $2,160 a year. Nothing about it is improper, and it is documented. It is simply not the figure that gets compared in roundups, which almost always quote the introductory rate against competitors' standing rates.
If your reason for looking at Toggl is cost rather than features, compare year two, not year one. Its free tier is a separate question we have covered in what Toggl Track's free plan actually includes.
Hubstaff: a real free plan, for exactly one person
Hubstaff's free plan exists, which is worth stating plainly because it has been reported both ways. Per Hubstaff's own support documentation it is the one-member plan: a single seat for the organization owner, with a limited feature set, limited screenshot storage, and no scheduled reports.
That makes it genuinely useful for a freelancer who needs to show proof of work to a client, and useless for a team, because the second person requires a paid plan. There is also a 14-day trial of the full feature set with no card required, which is the better way to evaluate it.
The thing to weigh with Hubstaff is not the price but what you are buying: it is built around monitoring, including screenshots and activity levels. If that is not what your team needs, a cheaper monitoring tool is still the wrong tool. Our Hubstaff alternatives piece covers where that fit breaks down.
TimeCamp: the lowest list price here
TimeCamp runs Starter, Premium and Ultimate, and it is the cheapest paid option in this group on headline rate:
- Premium - $6.99 per user per month billed monthly, $4.99 billed annually.
- Ultimate - $9.99 per user per month billed monthly, $6.99 billed annually.
- Starter - lower again, in the region of $3 to $4 per user per month on annual billing.
A free tier exists. Its specific limits are not clearly stated in the pricing documentation, which is itself worth knowing before you plan around it: check the seat and feature caps in the app rather than assuming from the word free. If you are weighing it directly against Hubstaff, the Hubstaff and TimeCamp comparison goes feature by feature.
Everhour and Memtime, briefly
Everhour is best understood next to Harvest rather than on its own, because the choice between them is usually about integration depth rather than price. Harvest versus Everhour covers that comparison properly, and it is the better page for a pricing question about Everhour specifically.
Memtime is the outlier in this group because it is an automatic tracker: it records what you were working on and asks you to assign it later, rather than asking you to start a timer. Pricing runs from around $11 per user per month for Basic up to roughly $21 for Premium on a biannual billing cycle, with Connect and Enterprise tiers between and above. The billing period is unusual enough to check carefully, since a biannual cycle is neither monthly nor annual and does not compare cleanly to either.
Why the annual discount is not automatically the cheaper choice
Every tool here discounts annual billing, usually by 20 to 30 percent, and the arithmetic looks settled. Two things complicate it, and both come out of the pricing above.
An annual commitment is also a commitment to the renewal rate. Toggl is the clean case: paying annually buys $14 per license for twelve months and then presents $18. Paying monthly costs more in year one and leaves you free in month four, when you have learned whether the team actually uses it. For a tool nobody has adopted yet, that optionality is worth real money, and it is never priced into the comparison.
An annual seat count is a guess about a year from now. Most annual plans are billed on seats bought rather than seats used, so a team that shrinks pays for people who left, while a team that grows adds seats mid-term at whatever the current rate is. If your headcount is stable, annual is straightforwardly cheaper. If it moves either way, the discount is smaller than it looks.
A reasonable default: pay monthly through the first quarter, then commit annually once you know the tool has stuck and how many seats you truly need. The premium for those three months is usually smaller than one wrong annual commitment, and it removes the most expensive mistake in this category, which is paying for a year of something the team quietly stopped opening in week three.
The exception is Harvest's Flex model, where the variable is usage rather than seats. There, the question to answer before committing to anything is how many active projects and clients you carry in a normal month, because that is the number the bill tracks.
The six compared
Verified August 24, 2026. Rates are list prices per user per month.
| Tool | Entry paid rate | Free tier | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| TimeCamp | Premium $4.99 annual, $6.99 monthly | Yes, limits unclear | Free-tier caps are not documented on the pricing page |
| Memtime | From ~$11 (Basic) | No | Biannual billing cycle does not compare cleanly |
| Harvest | ~$10.80 annual, ~$12 monthly | 1 person, 2 projects | Flex adds usage charges from the second renewal |
| Toggl Track | Premium $14 annual, year one | Yes | Renews at $18, about 29% more |
| Hubstaff | Paid from the second seat | 1 seat, limited | Free plan is one person only; product is monitoring-led |
| Everhour | See the Harvest comparison | - | Usually chosen on integrations, not price |
Four things to check before you commit
- What is the second-year price per seat? Not the first. This single question separates Toggl from most of the group and would change plenty of decisions on its own.
- Is the per-seat rate the whole bill? Harvest's Flex model is the example here, and usage-based components are increasingly common. Ask what is metered and what the included allowance is.
- What does the free tier actually permit? One person and two projects is a very different thing from a free plan for a small team, and both get called free.
- What happens at the seat you are about to add? Several plans here change character at seat two rather than seat ten.
If those four questions feel like a lot of work for a time tracker, that is a fair reaction and it is part of why we built Timen to be free with every feature included. There is no second-year rate, no usage meter and no seat at which the answer changes, which is a smaller claim than it sounds and removes exactly these four questions.
The short version
TimeCamp is cheapest on list price. Harvest is the one whose bill can move without you changing anything. Toggl is the one whose budget breaks in year two. Hubstaff's free plan is one person, and Memtime is billed on a cycle that makes comparison awkward.
None of that shows up if you compare the six headline numbers, which is the comparison almost everyone makes.
