Commitment
Your data, and what happens if we get bought
There is a button in Settings that gives you your entire account as CSV, in one file, right now. It is on every plan, including the free one. It does not require a support ticket, a notice period, or our permission, and it works the same on the day you sign up and the day you leave.
If you are here because a tool you relied on was acquired and repriced, that is the only kind of answer worth anything. Everything else on this page is detail.
What is in the file
Clients, contacts, projects, tasks, every time entry, expenses and their categories, invoices, invoice line items, payments and your people. Plus a README that explains the format: which columns are money (cents, as whole numbers, negative where a credit exists), which are seconds, and how the rows join together.
That README is deliberate. An export nobody can read is a checkbox, not data ownership. If a competitor needs the format explained in order to import you, send them the file.
The one gap, stated plainly
Uploaded files (receipts, logos, profile pictures) are not in the archive yet. Ask and we will send them. That is the one part that still needs a human, and we would rather say so here than let you discover it at the worst moment.
What we cannot promise
FlatHours is new. Champlin Enterprises, LLC is new. We are small, and we are not going to pretend otherwise by putting a founding year on a badge.
So we cannot honestly promise you that we will never be acquired. Nobody can. The people who promised that to Harvest customers were not lying either, right up until the company changed hands and the promise stopped being theirs to keep. A pledge about our future conduct is worth exactly as much as the pledge you are currently migrating away from.
So judge the exit, not the promise
What actually protected you was never a vendor's good intentions. It was whether you could leave on the day the terms changed. We wrote four questions for judging any vendor. Here they are turned on us, with the answers you can verify yourself rather than take on trust:
Can you get your data out today, without asking?
Yes. Settings, Your data, one button, every plan. No request, no notice period, no negotiation. Dropping from a paid plan to the free one does not lock your history.
Is any part of the bill metered?
No. Nothing is counted on any plan: not invoices, projects, clients or tasks, and we take no percentage of what you collect. Free is limited by seats and by which features are switched on, never by how much you use it.
Are the rates published?
Yes. One number per plan, on the pricing page. There is no usage layer, so there are no per-unit rates to hide.
Is there a written commitment about price changes?
In the Terms, not here: an existing paid subscription keeps its price for at least twelve months after any change, we email before anything takes effect, and we will not add a usage fee to a subscription you already hold.
Read the Terms and the Privacy Policy rather than taking our word for it. If an acquirer ever wanted to change any of that, they would have to change it in public, on these pages, where you can see it, and you would already have your data.
On being new
The fair objection to a young product is that it might not be here in three years, or that it is a thin clone that will be abandoned. We cannot argue you out of that with adjectives. What we can do is make the cost of being wrong about us close to zero: the free plan is free and unmetered, the import brings your Harvest history over, and the export takes it all back out again in one click.
FlatHours is built and run by Kevin Champlin, who has been writing production software since 1998, under Champlin Enterprises, LLC. That is a person with a name and an address on the Privacy Policy, not a support alias. It is also, honestly, a small operation, and you should price that in.