TallyHo Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

TallyHo is a deliberately small time tracker for solo freelancers, built around logging tasks after the fact instead of running timers. The free tier is unusually generous and the Pro plan is $5 a month. Best for: solo freelancers who hate timers. Price: from $5/mo. Free plan: yes. Rating: 6.7/10

What is TallyHo?

TallyHo is browser-based time tracking for freelancers, contractors and sole traders. It does one job: capture how long you spent on what, attach a rate to it, and hand you a timesheet you can bill from. There are no team permissions, no approval chains, no screenshots of your desktop and no productivity scoring. The pitch is simplicity, and unlike most tools that claim that, TallyHo actually enforces it by leaving things out. Most time trackers are team products with a solo plan bolted on. This one is the reverse.

It was built by Steve Leggat under the New Zealand studio Front and Back, off the back of more than two decades of freelancing and a long-running frustration with tools that were either too heavy or too fiddly. That origin explains the design decisions. It is an indie product with one person behind it, not a venture-backed platform chasing enterprise seats. We dug into it expecting a thin side project and found something more considered than that, though the small-team reality does show up in the gaps. The feature set is opinionated in a way that only happens when the person building the tool is also the person using it every day.

What Are TallyHo’s Key Features?

Task logging without timers

TallyHo drops the start-stop timer as the primary interface. You add tasks with Quick Add, which autocompletes from your history and pre-fills client, project and rate. Durations accept whatever format you think in: 1.5h, 90m or 1:30 all work. There is smart gap detection that spots the empty space between two logged tasks and suggests a duration to fill it, which is the single most useful feature here if you are the kind of person who forgets to hit start. Double-clicking any entry edits it, and duplicating a task carries the client, project, rate and duration across for recurring work. In practice you reconstruct a day in a couple of minutes rather than policing a stopwatch all afternoon.

Nested rate handling

Rates cascade. You set a default hourly rate, then override it per client, then per project, then per phase inside a project. That sounds obvious until you try it in a free tier elsewhere and discover billable rates are a paid feature. Toggl Track, for one, puts billable rates and project revenue reporting behind its paid Starter plan. TallyHo gives you the full rate hierarchy on the free tier, along with support for over 40 currencies. Expenses sit alongside time entries too, so mileage, printing and stock photo costs land on the same client record instead of a separate spreadsheet.

Timesheets, not invoices

TallyHo deliberately does not invoice. It generates timesheets in three formats, Default, Detailed and Minimal, and gives you a Ready to Invoice view that groups every unbilled task by client. You copy that into Xero, FreshBooks, Hnry or whatever you already use, then mark the work as invoiced with one click. This is a real philosophical choice and it cuts both ways. If you already have an accounting tool you like, the handoff is clean. If you wanted one app that tracked time and sent the bill, this is not it, and no amount of waiting will change that. The upside is that the timesheet formats are clean and the Ready to Invoice grouping means the copy-paste takes under a minute per client.

Exports, Zapier and the AI data feed

Everything comes out as CSV from Settings, so there is no lock-in. Automation runs through Zapier rather than a long list of native integrations. The more interesting option is the AI Data Feed: a private read-only URL that exposes your time data so you can point Claude or ChatGPT at it and ask questions like which clients are actually profitable, without exporting a spreadsheet first. It is a smart use of a small team’s effort, letting an external model do the analytics work rather than building a reporting suite nobody would match. There is also a built-in insights view covering where your hours went, goal progress and profitability patterns, which handles the obvious questions without needing the AI route.

How Much Does TallyHo Cost?

TallyHo Pro is $5 a month, or $55 a year, billed in USD through Stripe. That buys unlimited clients and unlimited projects per client, plus priority email support. That is the entire paid offering. No seats, no tiers, no add-ons. You can cancel any time, and the annual price works out at just under $4.60 a month.

The free plan is the real story. It covers 5 clients with 10 projects each, so 50 projects total, with unlimited time entries and every feature switched on. No credit card, no expiry, no locked reports. Most freelancers working with a handful of retained clients will never hit that ceiling, which means TallyHo is effectively free for a large share of its audience. That is either admirable or commercially reckless depending on your view, but as a buyer it is a good deal. Nothing is held back until you pay, which is rare enough in this category to be worth calling out.

Against the market, the pricing is aggressive. Harvest charges around $12 per user per month on its Pro plan, and its free tier is capped at one user and two active projects. Toggl Track Starter runs about $9 per user per month annually. Clockify is the closest on price, with a very generous free plan and a Basic tier at $3.99 per user per month, though its interface carries the weight of being a team tool first. TallyHo at $5 a month sits below almost everything and, unlike the others, is not charging you per seat for a product you use alone. Over a year the gap against Harvest is more than $90, which is real money on a freelance overhead line.

Who is TallyHo Best For?

Use TallyHo if you freelance solo and bill by the hour. Designers, developers, writers, consultants and contractors with a manageable client list are exactly the target.

Use TallyHo if you consistently forget to start a timer. The retrospective logging model and gap detection are built for people who reconstruct their day at 5pm rather than tracking it live.

Use TallyHo if you already have invoicing sorted. The Xero and Hnry orientation makes it a good fit for people running a simple accounting stack, and Zapier covers the rest if you want the handoff automated.

• Skip it if you have a team. There is no shared workspace, no permissions and no approvals, and this is by design rather than a roadmap item.
• Skip it if you want invoicing in the same tool. You will be copy-pasting timesheets, every month, forever.
• Skip it if you need native mobile apps. TallyHo is a progressive web app you add to your home screen, not an App Store download, and it needs a connection because there is no offline mode.
• Skip it if you need deep reporting, resource forecasting or client-facing portals. It is not competing there.

Best TallyHo Alternatives

Toggl Track

The default choice in this category and a much bigger product. The free plan covers up to 5 users, and Starter costs roughly $9 per user per month billed annually, with Premium around $18. Toggl has native desktop and mobile apps, browser extensions that track inside other tools, and far stronger reporting. The trade-off is that billable rates and revenue reporting sit on the paid plan, and the product is built for teams first. If you want polish and apps, pay the difference.

Clockify

The most generous free tier in time tracking: unlimited users, unlimited projects and unlimited entries at no cost, with Basic at $3.99 per user per month and Standard at $5.49. It does more than TallyHo in almost every dimension, including invoicing, time-off tracking and approvals. It is also noticeably more complex, because it was designed for agencies managing staff. Choose Clockify if you might grow into a team. Choose TallyHo if you are certain you will not.

Harvest

The premium option at about $12 per user per month for Pro, with a Premium tier around $17.50. Harvest does the thing TallyHo refuses to do: it tracks time and sends the invoice, with payment collection built in. Its free tier is tight, capped at one user and two active projects. Note that Harvest was acquired by Bending Spoons in 2025 and new terms took effect in January 2026 introducing usage-based fees on top of the seat price, so read the plan details before committing.

Final Verdict: Is TallyHo Worth It?

TallyHo lands at 6.7 because it does a narrow job well and asks almost nothing for it. The retrospective logging model with gap detection is a genuine improvement for anyone who never remembers to hit start, the rate cascade is better thought through than tools charging ten times more, and giving away every feature on a 50-project free tier is close to unheard of. At $5 a month, the Pro plan barely needs justifying. It is the cheapest line item on most freelance expense sheets.

The reasons it does not score higher are structural, not cosmetic. It is a one-person product, which is a real risk when you are storing years of billing records in it, though the full CSV export softens that. There are no native apps, no offline mode, no invoicing and no team support, and none of those are coming, because leaving them out is the entire premise. If you are a solo freelancer with a short client list who already invoices elsewhere, this is a smart, cheap pick and you should start on the free tier today. If you expect to hire anyone, or you want one tool from timesheet to paid invoice, choose Clockify or Harvest instead.