"A 6-Person Studio, 3 Years: $2,570 vs $198"

#The question nobody asks until it is too late

When a studio picks a time tracker, the decision usually comes down to a glance at a pricing page. Nine dollars a user a month. Twelve dollars a user a month. Free. The numbers are small enough that the decision feels small, and the decision is made in an afternoon.

The mistake is comparing monthly prices. A time tracker is not a monthly purchase. It is a multi-year commitment, because the thing you are really buying is a place for your history to live, and history does not migrate on a whim.

So the honest question is not "what does it cost this month?" It is "what does it cost this team over the life of the relationship?"

That question has a very different answer than the pricing page suggests. Here is the math, worked out for the case that matters most: a six-person studio, three years, the tools that actually compete.

---

#The assumptions, stated plainly

Before the spreadsheet, the assumptions, because cost comparisons are only honest when you can see the inputs.

• Six people, the size of a small studio or agency that bills clients for time. This is the owntime target, and it is also squarely in the middle of Harvest's and Toggl's team pricing.
• Three years, a realistic horizon for a tool you are going to build history in. Shorter and the subscription wins on inertia. Longer and the owned option wins harder.
• The pricing each vendor actually publishes, at mid-tier plans, not teaser rates. Harvest's figure reflects the reported post-2026 pricing. Toggl uses its standard paid tier. Clockify shows both the free tier and a typical paid plan. owntime uses its real one-time price.
• No discounting, no negotiation, no grandfathered deals. The math assumes the worst case for the buyer, because the worst case is what the pricing page does not show you.

With those inputs, here is the three-year table.

Tool	6-person, 3-year cost	How it adds up
Harvest	~$2,570	~$11.90/user/month at reported post-hike pricing
Toggl Track	~$1,944	~$9/user/month on the standard paid tier
Clockify	$0 to ~$3,240	Free tier is $0; paid plans run ~$9-15/user/month
owntime	~$198	2 one-time licenses at $99 early bird (up to 3 people each)

The gap between the top and the bottom is roughly $2,300 over three years, for a studio of six. That is a real number. It is a new monitor for everyone, a team offsite, or about twenty hours of one person's billable time spent on something other than billing.

I want to be straight with you about where this table came from. This is not a marketing analyst's projection. When my own Harvest bill changed, I opened a spreadsheet and ran this exact math on myself, solo, three years out, subscription column against a one-time purchase column. The subscription column kept growing and the one-time column stayed flat, and the flat column won even before I added the risk that the subscription number could change again. That spreadsheet is sitting in my files right now. It is the reason owntime is buy-once instead of yet another subscription. The pricing page is not a strategy I chose after research. It is the conclusion of a math problem I ran on my own business.

And the gap is the least interesting part of the table. The interesting part is what the rows do not show.

#Reading the table the way an owner should

The three-year cost is the visible number. The invisible number is the risk each row carries, and that is where the table stops being arithmetic and starts being a business decision.

The Harvest row is a bet on a new owner. The reported pricing after the Bending Spoons acquisition is baked into that ~$2,570. The bet is that the new owner stops at one repricing. History says the first repricing is usually not the last, because the architecture that enabled the first one is still there. The row is not just a cost. It is a cost with a second shoe waiting to drop.

The Toggl row is a rent payment with no equity. Toggl is a fine product, and the ~$1,944 is the price of renting it well. The number renews every year, forever, and it can change whenever Toggl needs it to. There is no year four where the cost drops to zero, because renting does not have a year four. It has a year four invoice.

The Clockify row is the trickiest. The free tier genuinely costs $0, and for a studio that will never need more, it is the cheapest row in the table and this post is not going to pretend otherwise. But the free tier is a strategy, not a promise, and the row has a footnote: your entire billing history lives in their cloud, which is the leverage a future pricing change would use. The $0 is real. The risk is not priced.

The owntime row is the only one that ends. Two licenses at $99 early bird cover six people and cost $198, once. There is no renewal. There is no year four invoice. There is a file on each person's disk and a license that verifies offline. The row ends at $198, which is the whole point of the row.

#The solo case, because not everyone is six people

The six-person studio is the headline, but most of the people reading this are probably solo, so here is that math too.

A solo consultant on Toggl's paid tier pays roughly $9 a month, about $108 a year, about $324 over three years. The same solo consultant buys owntime once for $99.

The solo break-even is around eight to nine months. After that, every month of owning owntime is cheaper than the month before it would have been rented, and the gap compounds for as long as the tool is in use. At year three, the solo Toggl user has spent about $324 and owns nothing. The solo owntime user has spent $99 and owns the tool.

Even against the free tier, the solo math has a shadow. Clockify at $0 beats owntime at $99 on the ledger. But the ledger does not price the history sitting in Clockify's cloud, and the day that history becomes leverage is the day the $0 row gets its real price.

#What the spreadsheet cannot price

The whole point of working out the three-year cost is to admit that the most important column does not fit in a spreadsheet.

What is your history worth? Your timesheets are your billing memory, your tax trail, your evidence in a dispute with a client. If the tool that holds them disappears, or reprices itself, or gets acquired, the cost is not the new invoice. It is the years of records that become inconvenient to leave.

The subscription rows price the tool. They do not price the hostage. And the hostage is the real reason the owned row exists.

Here is the asymmetry that the spreadsheet cannot capture. With a subscription, the worst case is the price changes and your history is the thing that makes you pay it. With an owned tool, the worst case is the tool stops improving and your history stays in a file you hold. The worst case of owning is better than the best case of renting, and no three-year table can put a dollar on that, because it is not a dollar question. It is a control question.

#The honest counterarguments

A cost comparison written by the maker of the owned tool should bend over backward to be fair, so here are the honest reasons the subscription rows win.

Subscriptions include things owntime does not have. Toggl and Harvest include mobile apps, team live-editing, integrations, and hosted reliability. owntime is a Mac desktop app with no phone app and no shared live workspace. If a studio needs those, the subscription is buying something owntime is not selling, and the comparison is apples to oranges.

The monthly number is easier to cash-flow. $198 for two licenses, even once, is a bigger single outlay than $9 a month. A studio that is cash-tight this quarter might rationally prefer to spread the cost, even if the total is higher.

A free tier is a real price of zero. For a studio that will never need more than Clockify's free plan offers, paying for owntime is paying for control they may not value. Control is only worth buying if you would actually use it in a crisis.

Those are fair. They are also why this post is not "everyone must buy owntime." It is: if you are a six-person studio that bills by the hour and plans to be around in three years, the owned row is the only one where the number you see is the number you pay.

#How to run this math on your own studio

You do not have to take the table on faith. Here is how to run it for your actual numbers, in about ten minutes.

1. Count the people who actually use the tracker. Not the seats you pay for. The people who log time weekly.
2. Pick a horizon. Three years is honest for a tool you will build history in. If you genuinely expect to switch in a year, the subscription math changes and you should use one.
3. Write down the real per-seat price. Mid-tier, not teaser. Multiply by people, by twelve, by three.
4. Add the one-time rows. A buy-once tool is licenses times the license price, once, where one license covers up to three people.
5. Add the risk column. For each subscription, write one line: what happens if the price doubles, and what it would cost you to leave with your history intact. If that line is blank, you have not done the math yet.

The table you end up with will look different from mine, because your prices and your people are different. The shape will not. The subscription rows keep going. The owned row ends.

#FAQ

How much does owntime cost for a team?

owntime is a one-time purchase per license. Each license is $99 during the early bird and $149 after, and one license covers up to three people, one Mac each. A 6-person studio at early-bird pricing is about $198, once, with no renewal.

Is Toggl cheaper than owntime over three years?

For a 6-person studio over three years

, Toggl is roughly $1,944 against about $198 for two owntime licenses. For a solo user, owntime breaks even around eight to nine months against Toggl's ~$9 monthly tier.

What is the real Harvest cost after the price increase?

The reported post-2026 Harvest pricing puts a 6-person studio near ~$2,570 over three years at roughly $11.90 per user per month, depending on plan. That figure reflects the increase after Bending Spoons acquired the company.

Is Clockify cheaper than owntime?

Clockify's free tier costs $0 and is genuinely free, making it cheaper on the ledger. The trade is that your history lives in Clockify's cloud, which is the leverage a future pricing change would use. If you value holding your own data, owntime's one-time cost buys that control.

Does owntime have the same features as Harvest or Toggl?

No. owntime is a Mac desktop app for solo consultants and small agencies, with no phone app and no shared live team workspace. Harvest and Toggl include those. The cost comparison is about ownership and control, not feature parity.

#The bottom line

The pricing page shows you the monthly number because the monthly number is the one that hides the total. The real cost of a time tracker is the three-year number, and the three-year number has a shape: the subscription rows keep going, and the owned row ends.

Six people, three years, about $2,300 of difference, and one row where the risk of the next repricing is not a column because there is no next repricing to have.

Do the math for your own studio. Count the people, pick the horizon, write down the real prices, and add the risk column. If you end up in the owned row, the number you see is the number you pay, this year and every year after.

Buy owntime once, $99 early bird · Try it free for 14 days first · See the honest per-license math · Compare with Harvest

---