Time tracking that runs itself cut SaaS costs by 95%
Most companies have at least one subscription like this: everyone agrees the tool is necessary, but the work keeps happening around it. People postpone using it, keep a separate spreadsheet, or ask someone else to fix the data later. The company keeps paying because replacing it sounds like a much bigger project.
For one growing team, that tool was its time tracker.
Logging time had become a chore. Team leads spent part of every week reminding people to clock their hours, entries came in late or not at all, and hours piled up in categories nobody could explain. The monthly reports the business relied on became hard to trust.
A tracker that does the logging
We replaced the subscription with a tracker built around one question: how little effort can recording time take?
The answer was to take the work out of it. When someone logs out, the tracker works out what they were doing that day and writes the entries for them. If hours are still missing, a reminder arrives in the chat tool the team already uses, whether that’s Slack or Teams. Anyone can also log time by telling their AI assistant, “Log 90 minutes to the client workshop,” and the entry appears. The tracker works with any LLM, not just one.
We also left a lot out. The team didn’t need billable rates, approval chains, complex permissions, or locked reporting periods. Removing those features kept the experience focused and let us deliver a working system in weeks. A month after launch, nobody had missed what we’d left out.
Management sees where every hour goes
Once hours arrive on time and in the right place, the data becomes worth looking at. Management has a dashboard with the full picture: how much time goes into each project and process, who has logged and who hasn’t, and where the gaps are. Patterns that used to be buried in spreadsheets are easy to spot, and decisions about what to improve rest on real numbers.
The team, meanwhile, spends its time on the work itself rather than on recording it.
The cost of keeping a tool nobody likes using
Subscription costs grow with the team. For illustration, 200 paid seats at $9 per seat per month cost $21,600 a year. That price is in line with published annual plans for Harvest Teams and Toggl Starter; it is not this client’s disclosed spend.
In this case, replacing the subscription cut the team’s time-tracking costs by 95%, and the build paid for itself within the first year. Unlike a per-seat plan, it doesn’t get more expensive with every new hire.
However convenient SaaS may be, ultimately you don’t control the tool, nor the price.
Which tool would you stop renting?
Think about the subscriptions your team renews almost automatically. Where do people keep their own records because they don’t trust it? Which simple task takes too many steps? Which features are you paying for but never use?
Those workarounds show where a focused tool could remove friction, connect to the systems you already use, and earn its place in the workflow.
If there’s a tool your team has wanted to replace for years, tell us what gets in the way. We’ll help you work out what a replacement would need to do and whether building it makes sense.
We build bespoke, interconnected systems like this one: delivered in weeks, owned outright, and saving scaling companies thousands of dollars a year in SaaS expenses.
Tell us which tool you’d most like to stop renting, and we’ll show you what replacing it looks like.