If you've compared time tracking apps, you've probably noticed a pattern: free invoicing is rare. Clockify puts invoicing behind a paid plan. Toggl doesn't really do invoicing at all — you export your hours and build the invoice somewhere else. The tools that do invoice well tend to start at $20 a month or more. Gigtime includes invoicing on every plan, including Free, with no invoice limit. People keep asking if there's a catch, so this post is the honest answer.
Tracking time without invoicing is half a product
Freelancers don't track time as a hobby. You track time to get paid. Every hour in your tracker exists so that, at some point, it can turn into a line on an invoice and then into money in your account. Splitting those two steps into separate products — a tracker here, an invoice generator there — means re-entering the same numbers twice and hoping nothing gets lost on the way.
We built Gigtime around the opposite idea: the distance between "hours logged" and "invoice sent" should be a couple of clicks. Pull your unbilled hours into an invoice, send it by email, record the payment when it lands. Charging extra for that last step felt like charging extra for the point of the whole app.
So how does Gigtime make money?
Two ways, and neither is your data.
First, the free plan shows ads on mobile and web. Not aggressive ones — a banner, the occasional interstitial. That covers a slice of the infrastructure for free accounts.
Second, Pro. It's $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year — and right now there's a founder price of $24.99 a year, locked in for life. Pro removes the ads and adds the power features: reports with custom date ranges and scheduled email delivery, CSV and PDF export, CSV import from other tools, and white-label invoicing so your invoices carry your brand instead of ours.
That's the whole model. Free users get a genuinely complete tool and see some ads. Freelancers whose business has grown into reporting and branding needs pay about the cost of one coffee a month. Nobody's usage gets held hostage — unlimited clients, unlimited projects, unlimited entries, unlimited invoices, on every plan.
What free invoicing includes (it's not a teaser)
The Free plan's invoicing is the same engine Pro uses: build an invoice from your unbilled tracked hours or add line items by hand, apply taxes and discounts, send it by email with a PDF attached, track when it's been viewed, record partial or full payments, and set invoices to recur for retainer clients. The one difference is branding — free invoices say "sent via Gigtime" and Pro ones don't. If you've never invoiced from a time tracker before, our guide on how to invoice as a freelancer walks through the whole flow.
Why we're comfortable saying all this
Pricing pages usually hide the reasoning. But freelancers are business owners — you evaluate tools the same way we evaluate our vendors, and "how does this company survive?" is a fair question to ask of any free product. We'd rather answer it plainly: ads pay for free accounts, Pro pays for the rest, and free invoicing is the bet that once turning hours into invoices takes two clicks, you'll stick around long enough to eventually want the Pro features too.
No invoice limits waiting to surprise you. No "your data is the product." Just a tracker and an invoicing tool that were built as one thing, because for a freelancer they are one thing.
Try Gigtime free — every new account starts with a 30-day Pro trial, no credit card required. When the trial ends, the free plan is actually free, invoicing included.