The subscription was cheaper and they built anyway

A construction firm came to me last winter wanting to track field time. They'd already found Clockify and done the math before we ever spoke.

The math was right. At the number of people they had, the subscription was cheaper than anything I could build them, and it wasn't close. I said so on the first call.

They bought the build anyway. $5K. It went live a few weeks later and they've been on it since. I've thought about that one a lot, because on paper I should have lost it.

Every hire made the cheaper option more expensive

Clockify prices per seat, like most tools in that category. So do Harvest and Toggl. You pay for each person who logs time.

Construction adds people in a way that punishes that. A job gets won and four guys go on site. Two of them are there for six weeks. Someone leaves in March and gets replaced in April. The headcount they had when they ran the comparison was the smallest it was going to be all year.

The owner worked that out on the call. He asked what happens to my price when he doubles the crew, and the answer was nothing. Hosting a few hundred more rows of time entries costs the same as hosting the ones already there. That was the moment the conversation changed.

They wanted to be the one deciding what got built

This came up second and I didn't expect it to matter as much as it did.

With a subscription you're waiting on somebody else's roadmap. If the CSV export is missing the column your payroll person needs, you file a request and hope. After launch they asked for a couple of changes. Free-text job codes, because the dropdown didn't cover the way they name work orders on site. A timesheet view for the guys to check their own week. Both went in.

Neither of those is a big feature. The point is they asked on a Tuesday and had it, rather than adding a vote to somebody's feedback board.

They asked for two things and meant it

They were clear about what they wanted it to do. Track time. Keep field workers accountable. That's the list.

So a technician opens it, taps a four-digit PIN, picks the job, types what he's doing, and hits start. That's the whole screen. There's no project budget, no billable rate, no approval chain, no invoicing. GPS gets recorded when the timer starts and stops, which is the accountability piece.

It also works with no signal, because half the sites don't have any. Everything writes to the phone first and uploads when the phone finds a connection again. That one came out of asking where the work actually happens rather than what the software should do.

A general time tracker has to carry features for agencies, freelancers and consultancies, and a construction crew ends up walking past all of it to get to a start button. I only had to build the start button.

What I do differently now on these calls

I used to run the price comparison at the headcount somebody has on the day we talk. Now I ask what it looks like in a year, and I run it both ways.

If the answer is we'll be about the same size, the tool wins and I say so. If the answer is we're hiring, the per-seat number moves enough that it's worth putting both in front of them and letting them pick.

I don't know what their break-even actually turned out to be. I'd have to know exactly how many people they added and when, and I haven't asked. What I know is they're still using it, which is more than I can say for most of the tools people tell me they bought and stopped opening.