Just Use Toggl Track Premium for Agency Billing

Your Harvest renewal notice just landed and the number doesn’t match last year’s. That’s not a billing error — that’s Bending Spoons’ new usage-based fee structure doing exactly what it was designed to do. G2 reviewers have documented increases of up to 600% post-acquisition. One 20-seat engineering consultancy reported their annual bill jumping past $20,000. If you’re running a 5–20-person agency billing clients by the hour, you need stable, predictable pricing and actual profitability reporting — not a base rate that balloons when you add one more project or client.

Just use Toggl Track Premium.

Why We Picked Toggl Track Premium

The agency use case for time tracking comes down to three things: knowing your billable rates by client and project, knowing whether those projects are actually profitable, and getting timesheets approved before invoices go out. Toggl Track Premium at $18/user/month (annual) handles all three without add-ons.

Profitability reporting is built into Premium, not locked behind an enterprise tier. The Insights dashboard shows Time, Revenue, Billable Time, Non-Billable Time, Billable %, Labor Cost, Profit, and Profitability — all in one view. Compare that to Harvest, where project profitability is an Enterprise-only feature at $14/seat (annual). If you’re on Harvest Teams at $9/seat, you cannot answer the question “are we making money on this client?” without upgrading every seat.

Billable rates in Toggl work at five levels: workspace, workspace members, projects, project members, and tasks. For agencies managing multiple clients at different rates — a retainer client at $120/hour, a project client at $150/hour, a junior team member billed at $85/hour — this granularity is the difference between accurate invoices and awkward conversations. The Starter plan unlocks billable rates; Premium adds historical billable rates, which means rate changes don’t rewrite your past reports.

Timesheet approvals land at the Premium tier too. For agency ops, this matters: account managers need a locked record before a client invoice goes out. Toggl’s approval workflow lets managers review and lock timesheets, so the numbers your billing team works from are the numbers your team actually submitted.

On pricing structure: Premium is $18/user/month on annual billing, or $22.70/user/month on monthly billing — roughly 26% more expensive if you skip the annual commitment. Annual billing is the right move for any agency with stable headcount. The Starter plan at $9/user/month (annual) gets you billable rates and project budget alerts but not profitability reporting, project forecasting, or timesheet approvals — it’s the right entry point if your agency is under 10 seats and not yet running utilization analysis.

One more thing: the free plan supports up to 5 users at $0, but it has no billable rates at all. Don’t waste time evaluating it for an agency context.

Why Not Harvest

Harvest is not a bad product. The time tracking UI is clean, invoicing is native, and expense tracking is built in. If you’ve been on Harvest for three years and your renewal hasn’t moved, none of this article applies to you.

The problem is Bending Spoons. Since the 2025 acquisition, Harvest restructured pricing to layer usage-based fees on top of the per-seat base rate — covering invoices, projects, clients, and tasks. The Teams plan starts at $9/seat/month (annual), but that’s the floor, not the ceiling. Users have reported automatic enrollment in Enterprise plans they didn’t request, usage estimates that dwarf their base rate, and renewal notices that bear no resemblance to what they paid twelve months ago. One user went from $130/year (single user) to a $19,000+ Enterprise quote. Another went from $12/month to $1,900/month. These aren’t edge cases — they’re documented in G2 reviews and multiple Reddit threads from 2025–2026.

Beyond pricing risk: project profitability reporting is locked to Harvest Enterprise at $14/seat (annual). Agencies on the Teams plan cannot access profitability data. And Harvest Forecast — the resource scheduling add-on most agencies need for capacity planning — costs an extra $5/person/month billed separately, on top of whatever your per-seat rate lands at.

If your team has been on Harvest for years, your pricing hasn’t shifted, and you’re comfortable with the Bending Spoons ownership trajectory, staying put has a real switching-cost argument. But if you’re evaluating time trackers fresh — or you just got a renewal notice that made you open this article — Harvest is the runner-up, not the pick.

Why Not the Rest

Clockify — At $5.49/user/month on annual billing (Standard tier), Clockify is genuinely cheap. The Standard plan unlocks invoicing, approval workflows, and QuickBooks integration, which covers the basics. But profitability reporting and labor cost tracking require the Pro plan at $9.99/user/month (monthly). By the time you’ve added the features an agency actually needs, the price gap with Toggl Track Starter has narrowed to nothing, and you’re on a platform with a smaller integration ecosystem and less agency-focused reporting. Clockify is the right pick for teams that need a basic timer with approvals. It’s not the right pick for agencies running client profitability analysis.

Timely — Timely’s automatic time tracking is genuinely impressive: it runs in the background, records desktop activity, and lets you review and drag entries into your timesheet rather than logging manually. For an agency with chronically under-logging team members, that feature has real value. But pricing starts at $20/user/month at the Premium tier (the only tier that supports up to 50 users), and adding Tasks — which most project-based agencies need — costs an extra $5/user/month on top of any plan. Realistic all-in cost for a task-heavy agency team runs $25–$33/user/month. At that price, Toggl Track Premium at $18/user/month is the better value, and Toggl gives you more control over billable rate structures than Timely’s automatic-capture model does.

RescueTime — RescueTime is a productivity measurement tool. It tracks app usage, website visits, and active windows to show how individuals spend their time. It’s well-built for what it does. What it doesn’t do: billable rate management, project profitability reporting, timesheet approvals, or client-facing invoice integration. Team pricing runs $9/person/month (monthly) or $6/person/month (annual). Putting it in this comparison is generous — it belongs in a different category entirely. If an account manager asks “are we profitable on the Acme account?”, RescueTime cannot answer that question.

When to Revisit

If your agency scales past 50 people and you need SSO, audit logs, and a dedicated customer success manager, move to Toggl Track Enterprise (custom pricing). If you’re a solo freelancer with occasional subcontractors, Toggl Track Starter at $9/user/month (annual) is enough — profitability reporting is overkill when you are the project. The Premium tier is squarely for the 5–20-person agency running multiple client accounts where someone in ops is actually checking margin by client each month.