If you are choosing time tracking software today, there are four questions you should answer before you trust any vendor—including us. You must know whether you can control your data, if your price can spiral as you grow, who is actually running the show, and how quickly your deal can be changed under your feet. This checklist is how you avoid regrets, and it will serve you whether you are switching from Harvest, evaluating FlatHours, or sizing up another newcomer.
Can you export everything—today, without a fight?
Most studios can recall the moment they needed a full export of their tracked time, project notes, client data, and invoice history. It may not have been a migration. It could have been an audit, a change in ownership, or simply the need to run a report that your old tool never built. Yet, too often, this data is locked up, bundled in strange or partial formats, or only available by opening a request. Some products claim 'export', but only after you talk to support, or with major gaps (attachments left behind, client tags missing, unlinked projects). Sometimes, the export format is only readable by their own importer, little more than a marketing funnel.
If you are evaluating a new tracker, test this before you sign. Walk through the export process in your own trial account. Download every project, every client, every timesheet, every invoice. Open up the files. Ask yourself: could your team rebuild your business if the service vanished tomorrow? If your operation involves AI agents or other systems pushing time entries, check whether all of that data leaves with you or always stays behind. At FlatHours, we built our export to serve this exact need, so an operator holding their own export is a feature, not a threat. You should expect that from any vendor. Accepting less is a decision to sign away control.
Is the price tied to your growth?
No matter how the site dresses it up, look for metering. Metering means any fee that rises with the number of invoices, projects, clients, tasks, or (the most common) seats or users. Metering is not only about the base price. Even if the monthly minimum feels right on day one, adding a single project, sending a busy month of invoices, hiring an AI agent, or onboarding an extra team member can push charges in ways you do not forecast. Harvest’s new pricing is a vivid example: in most accounts, the cost of tracking your own work rises as you bill more or expand your business. You pay more just for building more and shipping more.
Over months or years, a metered tracker will treat your growth as a billable event. These costs arrive at renewal or, worse, mid-cycle. If you are running a studio where every hire or AI agent is a margin bet, every metered fee is an unpredictable tax. By contrast, flat pricing is simple to audit and easy to map onto real project budgets. FlatHours prices everything at a flat rate, so your bill does not pop up when you launch a new service or hire a fourth contractor. If you are considering another tool, dig through their billing section and look at the triggers. If you spot a fee tied to the things you are paid to grow—clients, projects, people, automation—factor that into your calculation. If it looks like a metered treadmill, it probably is.
| Tracker | Invoices Sent | Clients Added | Projects Created | Seats/Users | AI Agents | Net Price Change as You Grow |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harvest (2026+) | May trigger fee | May trigger fee | May trigger fee | Per-seat | Check account | Rises as you do more |
| Keito (middle tier) | - | - | - | $19/user | Check plan | Rises with team size |
| FlatHours Team | No charge—unlimited | No charge—unlimited | No charge—unlimited | No charge—unlimited | No charge—counts like staff | Flat |
Who owns the company—and what is their incentive?
Some buyers skip this. They trust features and forget the incentives behind them. The last three years have shown why this is a mistake. Harvest was considered a safe pair of hands, yet its fate changed overnight in July 2025 when Bending Spoons acquired it and repriced everything. Bending Spoons is explicit about its growth model. Their public strategy is acquiring known brands, rolling up user bases, and seeking returns via aggressive monetisation and regular repricing. Any time tracking software you depend on is, in practice, a relationship with a boardroom you do not sit in.
Before switching, check the ownership. Look for statements about the vendor’s strategy, their independence, and their incentives to keep you happy. Are they operating for long-term stability, steady profit, or does the business need to multiply revenues by next year’s listing? Ownership does not make a company bad or good, but it tells you how much say you have in what happens next. Even as a new vendor, we make this transparent on our own data page, but buyers should hold us to the same light. If no-one can answer who calls the shots or who might tomorrow, you know your true risk.
What happens at renewal—and how much notice do you get?
If you miss this clause, you hand your budget over. Look for terms about price rises and plan changes. Many products reserve the right to change pricing, feature gating, or export access at renewal—or, in some, on short notice even within a paid term. Some vendors email about these changes, some slip them into dashboard messages, and some require you to spot them deep in their terms of service or invoice listings. The odds you will notice a 20% increase in a long billing cycle (or a new fee for API access or AI agent seats) before it hits your card are slim if you are not checking. If you plan to bill in advance, or sign long-term contracts of your own, you need to know how stable your costs are, and how much warning you really get. No time tracking software is immune to economic reality, but you can at least choose products where change comes with transparency and time to react. Relying on hope or habit is not enough.
Choosing time tracking software: A checklist you can use against us
This list is not about disrupting more software or pretending any tool is uniquely immune. Every vendor—including us—should be able to answer these questions plainly. If they falter, or you feel an extra pitch as you ask for the simple answers, that is the answer. It is worth pressing: Can you take all of your data with you? Will your price ever jump because you built more or shipped more? Who calls the shots and why? When can this deal change, and will you know before budget season? Each answer narrows the field, and each missing answer is a cost that will appear.
Nobody likes to negotiate with their own tools. But the cost of not checking is worse. If you hold your vendor—FlatHours or otherwise—to this checklist, your workflow might still be interrupted by change but you will never be surprised by it.