Clockify Capped Its Free Plan at 5 Users: What to Do Next

Clockify’s free plan was the reason most teams chose it. In April 2026 it stopped being unlimited. The free tier now covers five users, and several features that free accounts relied on moved behind paid plans. If your team is six people, the tool you picked because it cost nothing now has a price.

What actually changed

Clockify announced updates to its free plan in April 2026. The change most people notice is the seat count: the free plan previously supported unlimited users and now supports up to five.

The less visible part matters more for anyone who was billing from it. Billable rates, invoicing, scheduled reports, and parts of the export workflow moved to paid plans at the same time. A free account that used to produce a rated, exportable report now produces less.

CAKE.com, which owns Clockify, gave the reason plainly: the cost of maintaining global infrastructure for an unlimited number of free users, and a decision to focus on paid customers. That is an honest answer, and it is worth reading it as one. Running a genuinely unlimited free tier at that scale is expensive, and a bootstrapped company saying so out loud is more respectable than quietly degrading the product.

It is still a change that lands on the people who chose the product because of the promise that changed.

What it costs to stay

If your team is six people or more, Clockify’s free plan no longer fits and the question becomes which paid plan you need.

The feature that decides it for most teams is not the timer. It is the timesheet completion workflow: reminders that prompt people to fill in their week, approvals so a manager can sign off, and locking so a closed period stops moving. On Clockify those sit on the Standard plan, not Basic.

For a ten-person team that needs approvals, that is a real annual number where there used to be none. For a twenty-person team it is roughly double. Nothing about the work changed. The plan definition did.

Your three honest options

Stay free and stay under five. Workable for a genuinely small team, as long as you accept losing billable rates and some exports. Watch for the quiet version of this failure, where the sixth person just does not get an account and their hours go untracked.

Pay for the plan you now need. If Clockify’s integrations, invoicing, expenses, or scheduling are load-bearing in your process, paying is the correct answer. A tool that does four jobs is worth a bill; replacing it with one that does three is not a saving.

Move the time workflow somewhere it is still free. This is the right call when what you actually need is timers, timesheets, reminders, approvals, locking, rates, and exports, and the rest of Clockify was never really in use.

Where Sandtime.io lands, and where it does not

Sandtime.io is free for unlimited users. Approvals, reminders, locking, reports, Excel and CSV export, multi-currency reporting, and historical rates are all included, with no seat charge, no feature gate, and no credit card.

Two differences are worth stating plainly because they cut both ways.

Clockify has an auto tracker that records which applications and windows were active, and screenshots and GPS on its higher plans. Sandtime.io has none of that, on any plan, and will not add it. If automatic capture is what you want, Sandtime.io is the wrong tool and no amount of price advantage changes that. If it is what you have been trying to avoid, there is nothing to switch off.

Clockify creates invoices. Sandtime.io produces invoice-ready reports and exports, but it has no invoicing engine and no expense tracking. Teams that bill from their tracker directly should weigh that before moving.

A migration that does not start with cancelling

There is no one-click Clockify importer. That sounds like a problem and is mostly a scheduling one: the safe migration keeps the old system intact anyway.

The bottom line

Clockify did not become a worse product in April 2026. It became a paid one for most teams that were using it seriously, and the free tier that made it the default recommendation is gone.

If the parts of Clockify you actually use are the timer, timesheets, approvals, and reports, there is no reason for that to cost anything. Sandtime.io is free for unlimited users, includes the whole completion workflow, and comes from an agency that still runs its own client billing on it.

Start a free pilot, rebuild one active project, and run one real reporting cycle. If the numbers match, switch. If they do not, you have lost a week and learned something. Either way, do not cancel anything until finance has the archive.