Big changes to Clockify’s pricing; what this means for users?

Free users say reporting, exports and billable tracking disappeared with little notice, and Clockify’s review pages have turned sharply negative.

Time tracking provider Clockify has limited its free plan to five users and moved a range of previously free features into paid tiers, following an announcement by parent company CAKE.com on 21 April 2026.

The company said several previously free capabilities—including certain export options, Kiosk Mode, and shared reports—have been moved behind a paid plan, while Free users face a 30-requests-per-hour API cap. Subscription prices for existing paid tiers were left unchanged.

The changes, CAKE.com said, were driven by rising costs of supporting an unlimited number of free users across its global infrastructure had led the fully bootstrapped company to place greater emphasis on innovation and service quality, describing its paid-plan customers as its “true investors.” References to the “free forever” promise have also since been removed from the website.

In the months since, Clockify’s rating pages on Google Play, Trustpilot and Capterra appear to have been filled with one-star reviews from long-term free users; many of them solo freelancers and one-person businesses who say the change reached them without any notice they saw.

What is no longer free

Between the company’s documentation and what users report losing, the free plan changed in several ways at once:

• Workspace size — free workspaces are capped at five active users.
• Reporting range — reports are limited to a one-month window, so a quarter or a year can no longer be viewed at a glance.
• Data exports — CSV and XLS exports now require a paid plan.
• Billable tracking — Marking an entry as billable or non-billable, billable amounts and automatic time × hourly-rate calculation moved to paid tiers.
• Kiosk — kiosk mode is now paid.
• Sharing and access control — shared reports move to paid plans, and projects on the free plan are public by default, with private project access now a paid feature.
• API access — The free-plan rate limit was cut to 30 requests per hour.

In practice, despite the disclaimer of the changes, reviewers described being caught off guard by the loss of data they had relied on. Esther, who described herself on Trustpilot as a free Clockify user of roughly a decade, wrote on review platform on 16 June that she had gone to run her reports and found “all my saved reports, project % have gone” — including links she had sent on invoices days earlier, which no longer resolved. “No email or warning for this at all,” she wrote. “And I have pay the Standard package for 2 people when there’s only me to get my data back.”

What it means for the users who relied on Clockify

For teams of five or fewer, the user cap changes little. The features that moved are what reviewers appear to be describing as decisive, particularly for freelancers whose use case was tracking time against clients and billing from it.

“Unfortunately the free version is now practically useless,” wrote Sascha Z on Google Play on 9 July. “You can no longer have detailed reports for periods longer than 1 month, export data to CSV/XLS, or simply mark an entry as non-billable.”

The one-month reporting cap seems to recurs across reviews, as does the loss of rate calculation. “They removed the option to automatically calculate Time*Hourly_Rate, which was the only reason to keep freelancers like me on the platform,” wrote Nicholas Armstrong on 15 June. He considered paying — “$4 a month isn’t much” — but found “the minimum number of licenses is 2,” a floor that lands awkwardly on one-person businesses.

Other users echoed the same complaints about the removal of core features. In a May 19 Trustpilot review, D.T. BG wrote that recent plan changes had made Clockify “useless for freelancers,” citing the loss of hourly-rate tracking, Excel and CSV exports, and report histories beyond one month. “Instead of adding more value to their paid tiers, they decided that it’s easier to force upgrades by stripping basic features,” the reviewer wrote.

The sharpest criticism, though, does not appear to be about price. It is about notice. Zach Levin, who said he had used Clockify for years, wrote on Google Play on 2 August that he had discovered basic functionality had been moved behind a paywall without notice. Despite using the app daily, he said he “did not receive the in app notification the developer claims to have sent.” He described the move as “stripping away basic functionality of a glorified timer to try and force users to upgrade.”

“Without warning or notice, the terms were changed overnight and nearly all the functions I had were blocked behind a paywall, rendering it virtually useless,” wrote Kath Jeffery on Trustpilot on 14 August, adding that she had to open a free trial to export four years of project history.

Roman Pota, a solo freelancer of six years, wrote on 7 July that the plan was “quietly gutted — no email, no in-app notice, nothing. I logged in one day and the functions I relied on were simply gone.” Like Jeffery, he framed the objection as one of process rather than cost: “What bothers me most isn’t paying. I happily support free tools I value and have donated to far smaller projects many times. If Clockify had said ‘our costs went up, please chip in,’ I’d have paid without hesitation. Instead they removed core features overnight, mid-year, with zero communication.”

What Clockify says

Clockify defended the changes in its announcement, saying the shift would allow the company to “maintain a great Free plan for smaller teams” while reserving more advanced capabilities for paid plans.

CAKE.com also said remaining bootstrapped would allow it to continue investing in Clockify’s development, including new features requested by customers, while maintaining the quality and security of its products.

In a Clockify community forum thread, a company representative similarly said the plan still exists in reduced form, explaining that the company “had to limit the scale of the free plan” to fund security, development and maintenance. On communication, the representative said, “we made sure to send out in-app notifications a month before the switch,” and offered a 30-day trial to users who missed the notice. Several reviewers, however, said they received no notification, including web-only users who said they never open the mobile app.

The wider picture

Clockify’s case can show what happens when a free model is revisited on a live user base: the pricing decision drew comparatively measured criticism, while the rollout — allegedly involving miscommunication, a one-month reporting window, and exports and API access curtailed at once — drew most of the reaction.

For anyone choosing a tracker, the practical lesson could be to evaluate the available benefits, and whether records can be exported in a usable format on the plan actually being paid for, before years of data accumulate behind a tier boundary.