Clockify Shrank Its Free Plan in April 2026
Clockify’s reputation was built on an unusual promise: unlimited users, free, indefinitely. Freelance collectives and small agencies adopted it precisely because nobody had to justify a purchase order. In April 2026 the parent company, CAKE.com, ended that promise. The announcement on its own blog lists what moved behind the paywall and what limits arrived, and the change is substantial enough that any team currently running on the free plan should read it before their next invoicing cycle rather than after.
What April 2026 took away, itemised
CAKE.com’s announcement is unusually specific about the features that left the free tier, and the list is not cosmetic. Several of them are the things a small business actually tracks time for.
- Billable hours and rates now require a paid plan
- CSV and Excel report export moved behind payment
- Kiosk mode, used for shared-device clock-in, became paid
- Shared reports and project time estimates were removed from free
- Projects default to public, and private projects require a subscription
Five users, three webhooks, thirty API calls an hour
The hard caps are the more damaging half. Free workspaces are limited to five users, which converts what was a viable small-business tool into a hobby tier. Webhooks drop to three per workspace, and the API is throttled to 30 requests per hour per workspace.
That API figure deserves emphasis because it effectively ends integration use of the free plan. Thirty calls an hour is not enough to sync with an invoicing system, a payroll tool or a bespoke dashboard. Report date filtering is also restricted to one-month ranges, so year-end reconciliation on the free tier is no longer possible in a single query.
CAKE.com attributed the change to infrastructure costs and confirmed that existing paying customers were unaffected. It did not, in that post, set out a transition arrangement for free workspaces already above five people.
It is worth being precise about who is genuinely harmed. A solo freelancer tracking hours against three clients still gets a functional tool: the timer, the desktop and mobile applications, the auto tracker and basic reporting all remain. What they lose is the ability to export that data, which matters enormously if an accountant or a client expects a spreadsheet, and the ability to mark hours billable, which is the entire point of tracking them commercially.
What $3.99 a seat restores
Basic sits at $3.99 per seat per month on annual billing and 4.99 monthly, in US dollars, with the vendor adjusting displayed currency by location. It brings back billable rates, exports and the administrative basics, which is to say it restores most of what the free plan used to be.
Judged on its own merits rather than against the previous free tier, this is still inexpensive. Comparable trackers charge two to three times as much for equivalent functionality. The irritation is not the price but the sequence: teams that standardised on Clockify because it was free are now being billed for a product they already deployed and trained people on, which is a switching cost the vendor is well aware of.
One practical consequence deserves flagging for anyone mid-migration. Because private projects now require a subscription and projects default to public on the free plan, a workspace that was quietly relying on project-level privacy may have had that expectation reset. Administrators should audit which projects are visible to which members before assuming the previous configuration survived the change intact.
Where Standard, Pro and Enterprise start earning their gap
Standard at $5.49 annually adds the approval workflows and timesheet locking that agencies need before they can bill a client from the data. Pro at $7.99 brings scheduling, expenses, forecasting and the profitability reporting that turns time data into margin analysis, and Enterprise at $11.99 covers single sign-on, custom subdomains and audit controls.
The pattern is coherent, and the increments are small enough that most buyers will land on Standard or Pro without agonising. The CAKE bundle at $12.99 a seat packages Clockify with the company’s other tools and is advertised at a 53% saving against buying them separately, which is only a saving if you wanted the other tools.
Buyers should also weigh the parent company relationship. Clockify now sits inside CAKE.com alongside sibling products, and the bundle pricing is constructed to make the suite look like the rational purchase. That is ordinary commercial behaviour, but it does mean the roadmap for Clockify specifically is now set by a portfolio strategy rather than by a single-product company, and the April 2026 decision is the first clear evidence of what that looks like in practice.
Kiosk seats and the pricing wrinkle worth knowing
One genuinely good piece of pricing design survives the change. Users who only clock in and out through a shared kiosk are charged at a heavily reduced rate: $0.79 per seat annually on Basic rising to $2.39 on Enterprise. For a warehouse, kitchen or site crew, that distinction is the difference between Clockify being affordable and being absurd.
It also means the headline seat price overstates the cost for exactly the businesses that need the most seats. Anyone quoting Clockify for a mixed workforce of office staff and shift workers should build the estimate on two rates rather than one, and should confirm that kiosk-only users genuinely never need a full licence.
None of this makes Clockify a bad tool. The tracking itself is quick, the desktop application is unobtrusive, and the reporting at Standard and above is more than adequate for agency invoicing. The criticism is narrower and fairer: a vendor that built its market position on an unusually generous free tier has withdrawn it from teams that had already committed, and anyone evaluating a free plan on that basis should now assume it is provisional rather than permanent.
Sources: Clockify pricing · CAKE.com, Clockify free plan changes · Timen, is Clockify still free in 2026
