Clockify Gutted the Free Plan — Freelancers, Move to Toggl

Clockify just moved the features that freelancers depend on — billable rates, CSV exports, and shared report links — behind its paid plan. If you were running a billable-hours workflow on the free tier, that workflow broke on June 15, 2026.

What Happened

On April 21, 2026, CAKE.com (Clockify’s parent company) announced changes to the free plan, effective June 15, 2026. The features removed from free:

• Billable rates — now require a paid plan
• CSV and Excel exports — now paid-only
• Shared report links — now paid-only
• Project time estimates — now paid-only
• Unlimited report date ranges — free reports capped at 31 days
• Unlimited users — free tier now capped at 5 users

CAKE.com’s official reasoning: “As costs of maintaining a global infrastructure for an unlimited number of free users grow, CAKE.com, which is a 100% bootstrapped company, is focusing on remaining innovative and delivering quality service to our true investors — our paid plan customers.”

That’s an honest answer, at least. What it means in practice: the Clockify Standard plan — the minimum tier to restore billable rates — runs $5.49/user/month on annual billing, or $65.88/year for a solo freelancer. The community noticed immediately. One user on the Clockify forum put it directly: “So from June 15 the free plan is going to become so crippled it is almost useless. Why are Clockify not being open about this — you promised it as free forever — and now you are nixing it.” A Trustpilot reviewer who had used Clockify for six years as a solo freelancer described logging in to find features gone, with no email, no in-app notice — just gone.

Why It Matters

This isn’t a surprise if you’ve watched Clockify’s trajectory. Clockify is a team time tracker. Its product roadmap, its feature set, and its sales motion are all optimized for teams billing per seat. The free tier was always a top-of-funnel play — a generous starting point designed to get companies inside the product so they’d eventually pay for multiple seats. Solo freelancers were benefiting from a product built for someone else.

The SaaS feature-gating playbook is well established: build market share on a free tier, then progressively move the features that generate business value to paid plans. Clockify is now deep into that phase. The April 2026 cuts aren’t a one-time shock — they’re a signal that every billing-adjacent feature on the free plan is a candidate for removal in future pricing reviews.

The secondary effect matters too. Freelancers who built client-facing workflows around Clockify’s shared report links — sending clients a live report link at the end of the month instead of an exported PDF — lost that workflow with zero migration path. That’s not a minor inconvenience. That’s rebuilding a client communication process from scratch.

The Take

We’ve been recommending Toggl Track over Clockify for freelancers for a while. This change removes any remaining reason to stay on Clockify if you’re a solo freelancer or small team billing clients.

Toggl Track’s Free plan covers the basics that most solo freelancers need day-to-day: up to 5 users, unlimited projects and clients, autotracker, idle detection, calendar integration, and CSV and PDF report exports. If you were using Clockify’s free tier purely to track hours and export data, Toggl Free is a straight replacement.

The important caveat: Toggl Free does not include billable rates. If you need to track revenue and generate invoicing-ready reports — which is the whole point of time tracking for most freelancers — you need Toggl Track Starter at $9/user/month. That’s $108/year for a solo freelancer, compared to $65.88/year for Clockify Standard. The price difference is real, but what you get is a product actually designed for freelancer billing workflows, not a team tool with freelancer features stripped out.

Toggl Track Starter unlocks billable rates at the workspace, project, team member, and task level; project budgets with over-budget alerts; time rounding; and revenue reports. That’s everything you need to invoice accurately and argue with a client about hours.

Two alternatives worth naming and ruling out: Harvest is also $9/user/month and covers billable rates, but it’s now owned by Bending Spoons — the same company that gutted Evernote’s pricing — which is its own risk signal. Timely does automatic time tracking but prices at a level that’s hard to justify for solo use. Neither changes the conclusion. Toggl Track is the pick.

If you’re currently on Clockify’s free plan and the June 15 changes haven’t forced your hand yet, set a date now. Export your historical time data as CSV while it’s still free. Set up a Toggl Track workspace. Run both in parallel for one billing cycle to make sure nothing falls through. Then close the Clockify tab.