You're Paying 10x Too Much for Time Tracking

You’re Paying 10x Too Much for Time Tracking is straightforward once you stop adding process theater.

A 50-person team on Harvest pays $600/month. On Miru Pro, that’s $50. Here’s the math on why per-seat pricing is a scam. We write from operating experience, not trend-chasing.

The real cost of per-seat time tracking

FreshBooks Lite includes only limited time tracking and caps at a low client count. *FreshBooks doesn’t scale to large teams without jumping to premium plans that cost significantly more.

Look at the 50-user row. Harvest: $540/month. Miru: $50/month. That’s not a 10% savings. That’s a 90% reduction. For the same core functionality — tracking time, sending invoices, running reports.

At 100 users, you’re paying Harvest nearly $13,000 a year. Miru Pro is $1,200. You could buy your entire team lunch every month with the difference and still come out ahead.

“But they have more features”

Do they? Miru ships with six report types, five team roles, leave management, expense tracking, Stripe integration, a full REST API, and a CLI for terminal-based workflows. Harvest doesn’t have a CLI. Toggl doesn’t do invoicing. FreshBooks doesn’t do leave management.

The “features justify the price” argument falls apart when the cheaper product has more features. What you’re actually paying for with per-seat pricing is a business model, not a product.

The self-hosted nuclear option

But here’s where it gets really interesting. Miru is open source under the MIT license. You can self-host it on your own infrastructure. At that point, the cost per user drops to zero. A $20/month VPS runs Miru for a 200-person team.

Let’s add that to the math:

• 200 users on Harvest: $2,160/month ($25,920/year)
• 200 users on Miru (self-hosted): ~$20/month ($240/year)

That’s a 99% reduction. Your time tracking costs less than a single Harvest seat.

The uncomfortable truth

Per-seat pricing exists because companies can get away with it. You sign up when you’re small and the $9/user feels reasonable. Then you grow. By the time you’re 50 people, you’ve got years of time data locked in their system, and migrating feels like more hassle than just paying. That’s the trap.

Miru charges $1/member because that’s what fair pricing looks like for a time tracking tool. And if even that feels like too much, the self-hosted option is right there on GitHub.

Stop overpaying. Start free with Miru and keep the difference.

Hard Stop

Run this loop for two weeks without skipping cleanup. The compounding effect is real.

Start with Miru or read the docs.

Vipul A M

Co-founder at Saeloun. Building Miru. Rails contributor. Shipping from Pune, India.