Time Tracking Shouldn't Be Expensive

Watch how the average person at an agency actually uses their time tracker. They open it in the morning, start a timer or punch in a couple of entries, then switch tabs and forget about it. At the end of the day they tidy up — a line for the client call, a block for design work, maybe a note on the proposal that's due Friday. Total time spent operating the tool: ten, maybe twenty minutes. Then they close it until tomorrow.

Now look at the bill. Most popular trackers charge $8–12 per user, per month. For a 20-person studio that's $160–$240 every single month — north of $2,000 a year — for a tool each person touches for a quarter of an hour a day. Nobody really questions it, because that's just what time tracking costs.

Except it isn't. Not anymore.

The math nobody questions

Per-seat pricing has a strange property: your bill scales with your headcount, not with how much anyone actually uses the thing. The designer logging six entries a day and the contractor logging four entries a week cost you exactly the same. Add a person, add a toll — whether or not the tool does anything more for you.

So a 5-person team pays ~$50 a month. Twenty people, $200+. Fifty people, $500+. The software didn't get more capable as you grew; you just kept feeding the meter. And the usage per person never changed — still a few entries, still a few minutes.

For a category of tool that quietly runs in the background of everyone's day, that's a lot of money pointed at not very much.

Why time tracking got expensive in the first place

This isn't a story about anyone being greedy. Per-seat pricing made sense once. A decade ago, shipping and running software was genuinely expensive — data centers to rent, ops teams to staff, long release cycles, real cost behind every new customer you onboarded. Charging per seat was a fair-enough proxy for the load each user put on the vendor.

Almost none of that holds in 2026. Building software is faster and cheaper than it has ever been. Hosting an app for a team — even thousands of teams — is a rounding error compared to what it used to be. And let's be honest about the product itself: a time tracker is not a hard problem. It stores entries, adds up hours, and puts them on a report or an invoice.

The per-seat price tag is a holdover from an era of expensive software, kept alive mostly because customers got used to paying it. The costs that justified it have largely evaporated. The pricing hasn't.

A cheap price, not a cheap tool

The fair worry about a low price is that it buys you a worse product — that "affordable" is code for clunky and abandoned. It shouldn't be, and it doesn't have to be.

Quanta is a genuinely good time tracker: one-click timers and a weekly grid, AI that turns "spent the morning on the Acme redesign" into real entries, projects, clients, tasks and tags, budgets, detailed reports, invoicing, and expenses and mileage that bill straight back to the client. It's hosted, backed up, and updated for you. The low price isn't a reflection of how little it does — it's a reflection of what good software actually costs to build and run today.

That's the part the per-seat model gets backwards. You can charge a fair, flat price and ship a serious product. The two were never in conflict.

What it should cost

So we built Quanta around that idea: $10 a month for your whole team — up to 100 people, no per-seat fees, ever. Everything is included: unlimited time tracking, unlimited projects and clients, reports, roles, and 25 AI credits a month. A 20-person team pays $10, not $200. A 50-person team pays $10, not $500.

If you'd rather not think about it again, there's a lifetime option — $100 once, for early supporters — that includes every future update. It's a limited-time offer; when the window closes, Quanta goes monthly-only.

Time tracking is a few minutes of someone's day. The price should reflect that. Try Quanta free — no credit card required — and see what your team's whole bill looks like at ten dollars.