Revel Roots

what apps actually cost

Is It Earning Its Keep?

Time-tracking tools have a property almost nothing else in the subscription economy has: you can test whether they are worth paying for using their own data.

The tool measures time. The question is whether it saves more than it costs. Both quantities are in the same unit, and the calculation takes ten minutes. For a workplace-oriented comparison, employee attendance tracking software shows how the same measurement problem is approached when time data is used by a team.

For billing

The calculation is against hours you would otherwise lose.

Reconstructing a week from memory systematically undercounts. Most people billing hourly and writing timesheets on Friday lose somewhere between half an hour and two hours of genuinely billable time per week, to forgotten short tasks and rounded-down estimates. For a broader time-tracking or productivity comparison, Capterra time-tracking listings is another useful reference.

At your own rate, multiply that by fifty weeks and compare against the annual subscription.

For anyone billing above a modest hourly rate, the arithmetic is not close — a tool costing $150 a year against even one recovered billable hour per month pays for itself several times over. This is the case where subscription is straightforwardly justified, and it is the only tracking that reliably survives long-term.

One caution: this only holds if the tracking is actually accurate. A timer left running through interruptions overbills, which is a different and worse problem than undercounting.

For everything else

The calculation is against a notepad, and the notepad usually wins.

A personal question — where does the week go, how long does this task take — is finite. Two weeks answers it, and a stopwatch answers most of it for nothing.

So the honest comparison is not tool against no-tool. It is subscription against free tier against paper, for a question that will be answered and then stop being asked.

If you subscribed for a personal question, the review is: did I look at the data, and did anything change? If either answer is no at four weeks, that is the cancellation signal, and it arrives before renewal rather than after.

The test using the tool's own output

The nice part, and it works for both cases.

Look at how much time you spent operating the tracker. Starting timers, correcting entries, categorising, checking reports. Some tools will tell you directly; otherwise estimate from your own logs.

Then compare it against what the data changed.

If you spent three hours over a month recording and the output produced no decision, the tool cost three hours and a subscription and returned nothing. That is not a failure of the tool — it is a question that did not need continuous measurement, and the answer is to stop rather than to switch products.

The renewal question

Once a year, three lines.

What did this cost, annually? Not monthly.

What did it produce? A specific decision, an invoice accuracy improvement, a changed habit. If nothing comes to mind, that is the answer.

And would the free tier have done it? For a single person with one question, usually yes.

Three lines, once a year. It is the same review this site recommends for everything, and it works particularly cleanly here because the tool has been measuring the input the whole time.

The short version