Harvest bills beautifully. It just needs you to press start first.
Harvest has been the answer for agency time-and-billing for well over a
decade, and its invoicing is better than ours. What it has never done is
track your time on its own, and its 2026 pricing adds usage charges for
invoices, projects, clients and tasks on top of the per-seat rate.
First-party, OAuth, scoped to your existing permissions
One person Harvest: free tier, then $9 Stunda Pro: $4.49
5 people Harvest: $45 Stunda Team: $22.45
Harvest at $9 per seat a month, billed annually.
Harvest states that additional invoices, projects, clients and tasks are billed on usage on top of the base rate. Enterprise is $14 per seat a month on annual billing. Stunda Team is $4.49 per person a month, with no seat cap.
That is where the two models separate: 2.0x at 5 people.
A timer you have to start is a timer you will forget
Harvest's model assumes you press start when you begin and stop when you
finish. Every freelancer who has ever used it knows the failure mode: you
get absorbed, you surface two hours later, and you type in a number that
feels about right. Guessed hours round down, because nobody wants to
over-bill. Stunda removes the guess by measuring the session as it happens,
against the project, with the per-app breakdown behind it if a client ever
asks what the four hours were.
The 2026 pricing change is worth reading carefully
Harvest moved from a flat per-seat price to a base rate plus usage,
where additional invoices, projects, clients and tasks are billed on what
you use. For an agency that is defensible. For a freelancer it means the
month you send more invoices is the month the bill goes up, which is a
strange incentive in a product whose job is to help you invoice. Stunda Pro
is $4.49 with unlimited invoices, projects and clients, and the only thing
that changes the price is changing the plan.
Two projects is the real edge of the free plan
Harvest's free tier is genuinely useful and it is bounded in a specific way:
one seat and two projects. Everything else about it is complete, invoicing and
expenses included, which is more than most free tiers in this category offer. But
two projects is the number a freelancer passes in their second month, and passing
it is what moves you to the paid seat. That is a reasonable business model and it
is worth knowing the shape of before you build a workflow on the free tier.
Stunda's free plan is bounded on invoices per month rather than on projects or
clients, so the thing that runs out is the output rather than the filing.
Your time, inside the assistant you already use
Harvest ships a first-party MCP server too, and a good one: OAuth, and
scoped to the permissions you already have. So the interesting difference is
not whether an assistant can reach your account, it is what it finds when it
gets there. Ask Harvest where your week went and it can only tell you what you
remembered to type in. Ask Stunda and the answer is assembled from what the
machine actually recorded.
Your hours, readable from your own AI client
Stunda hosts an MCP endpoint, so Claude, Cursor, Codex and VS Code can answer
questions about your tracked week without an export. It runs strictly as you,
on every plan including Free, and it uses no AI quota.
Retainers, expense capture with receipts, automatic payment reminders,
clients paying by card through Stripe or PayPal, and clean two-way sync into
QuickBooks and Xero. Harvest has been refining this for over fifteen years
and Stunda has not caught up on any of it. If your business runs on
retainers and reimbursable expenses, Harvest is a better fit and this page
is not going to argue you out of it. The argument is narrower: Harvest bills
time it did not measure.
Moving over from Harvest
Nothing here is a migration project. The honest version is that tracking
starts fresh and your history comes across as a file.
Export your history from Harvest as CSV and keep it. It is your
record of what you already billed, and it does not need to live in Stunda
for that to be true.
Install Stunda and let it run for a week alongside Harvest. The
two do not conflict, and a week is long enough to see whether the sessions
it records match what you would have typed in.
Harvest has a free tier, so running both for a week costs nothing on either side.
Re-create your active projects and rates, which for most people is
a handful of rows. Historical entries can be posted through the API or
logged by an assistant through MCP if you want them in one place.
Invoice from Stunda once before you cancel anything. If the number
it produces matches the number you would have sent, the switch is done.
Harvest and Stunda: common questions
Does Harvest track time automatically?
No. Harvest is built around timers you start and stop, plus manual entry. There is no background tracking of applications or activity, which is the main reason people looking at this page are looking at it.
How much does Harvest cost in 2026?
Harvest Free covers 1 seat and 2 projects. Teams is $9 per seat a month on annual billing, or $11 monthly, and Enterprise is $14 per seat on annual billing. Harvest also bills additional invoices, projects, clients and tasks based on usage on top of the base rate. Checked 30 July 2026.
Can Stunda replace Harvest for invoicing?
For straightforward hourly billing, yes: pick the tracked entries, apply rates, brand it, send a PDF or a link. For retainers, reimbursable expenses, card payments and accounting sync, no. Those are Harvest features Stunda has not built.
Does Stunda integrate with QuickBooks or Xero?
Not directly today. Invoices export as PDF and time exports as CSV, and the API and MCP server can read entries programmatically. If accounting sync is a hard requirement, Harvest is the stronger choice.
How many projects does the Harvest free plan allow?
Two, on one seat. Time tracking, invoicing and expense tracking are all included on it, so the limit is the number of projects rather than the features. Checked 24 August 2026.
What does Harvest cost per seat?
Teams is $9 per seat a month billed annually, which Harvest shows as $108 per seat a year, or $11 month to month. Enterprise is $14 per seat annually or $17.50 monthly, and adds profitability reporting, timesheet approvals and SAML single sign-on. Checked 24 August 2026.
What happens to my Harvest history if I switch?
Harvest exports time and invoices as CSV, which you can keep as your record, and Stunda can take historical entries through its API or its MCP server. Automatic tracking starts from the day you install it, so most people run both for a couple of weeks.
Where these numbers come from
Every Harvest figure on this page was read off Harvest's own
public pages on , and we quote
their cheapest advertised rate rather than their most expensive. Prices
change; if you find one here that no longer matches theirs, it is our
mistake and telling us fixes it for everyone.
Stunda's own prices come from our pricing page, and the plan
limits described here are the ones the API actually enforces rather than
marketing copy about them.
Still measuring, since the moment you opened this page
You've been here 2:40.
That's $3.78 unbilled.
That's how it slips away: a few quiet minutes at a time, on every project.
Stunda catches them all day, silently, and turns them into invoices that
send in four steps.