Free time tracking for freelancers: what you actually get

“Free time tracker” is a perfectly reasonable search. Before committing €79/year to a tool, you want to know what you get for nothing.

The honest answer: quite a bit, with specific limitations that matter depending on how you work.

What Clockify’s free plan actually covers

Clockify is the dominant free option. The free tier is genuinely useful: unlimited tracked time, unlimited projects, unlimited users, basic reports. For a freelancer just starting out who wants to understand where their time goes, it’s a real tool, not a stripped demo.

The limitations show up in three places.

No invoicing. Clockify tracks time, but the free plan doesn’t turn that time into an invoice. You export a CSV, open a separate tool, and manually transfer hours into a format a client can receive. If you have 3-5 clients with different rates, that’s 20-30 minutes of reconciliation every month-end.

The surveillance architecture. Clockify’s paid features — activity level tracking, screenshot capture, idle time detection — are built for employers monitoring remote staff. The free plan avoids most of that, but the product is designed around a different problem than yours. You’re a solo freelancer billing by the hour; you don’t need a tool built to prove you worked to someone who doesn’t trust you.

The timer dependency. This is the one that actually costs money. Clockify’s free plan has the same constraint as every timer-based tool: you have to click start when work begins and stop when it ends. Forget once — an untracked 90-minute call, a client session that ran long, a morning of async messages — and that time disappears. At €80/h, one missed session per week is €5,760 gone over a year. The free plan doesn’t change that math.

Toggl’s free plan

Toggl Track offers a free plan for up to 5 users. Cleaner interface than Clockify, better reports, solid integrations. Same timer requirement, same forgetting problem.

For a direct comparison of what you get when you need to leave either: Toggl alternatives for freelancers who keep forgetting to track and Clockify alternatives for freelancers.

The cost hiding inside “free”

The timer problem isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a systematic revenue leak.

Most freelancers who track time honestly report forgetting 1-3 sessions per week. That’s not negligence — it’s how cognitive load works. You’re mid-task, a client calls, you handle it, you move on. The timer doesn’t know any of that happened.

A calendar-based approach removes the failure mode entirely. Your calendar already has the record: the call was in your diary, the focus block existed before you sat down, the meeting happened whether you tracked it or not. The event is the proof.

Timescanner’s free trial

Timescanner isn’t free. It’s €79/year after a 30-day trial with no credit card required.

For most freelancers, the trial is enough to run a full billing cycle. You connect your calendar, apply the naming convention — [ClientName] at the start of each billable event — and Timescanner reads your iCal feed to generate a billing summary per client. One month in, you know exactly what the tool does and whether it recovers enough missed hours to justify €79.

The 30-day window with no card commitment is a real free period. If you decide it’s not for you, you’ve lost nothing. If the first month recovers more than €79 in hours you’d have missed, the tool pays for itself.

Which one to use

You want free and you’re disciplined about timers. Clockify free plan works. The reports are functional, the data is yours, and the price is right. Accept that the accuracy depends entirely on your click habit.

You want free and you’re not disciplined about timers. There’s no free calendar-based tool that does what Timescanner does. The 30-day trial is the closest equivalent. Spend one month doing it properly, run the numbers on what you recovered, then decide.

You want invoicing included. Harvest covers that, but it’s $12/user/month. For a solo freelancer, that’s €144/year for a tool with a timer that still requires the same discipline.

You want accurate billing data without managing a timer. The calendar method is the only architecture that achieves that. The free period is 30 days. After that, it costs €79.

Timescanner works with Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Proton Calendar, Notion Calendar, Fastmail, and any iCal-compatible calendar.