A social retainer is priced once and delivered every month, and eventually the question arrives: is this client still worth what we quoted? Answering it takes one report, hours logged against that client set beside the hours the retainer was priced to cover. Every time tracker logs the hours. Far fewer do the comparison, and on the three tools checked here, the comparison sits on a higher tier than the logging.
The question a retainer forces you to ask
A fixed monthly fee moves all the estimation risk onto the agency. The client pays the same amount whether the month took twenty hours or fifty, so every hour past the number the price was built on comes out of margin rather than out of the invoice. Nothing about that shows up in the accounting: revenue per client looks identical across a good month and a bad one. The difference exists only in staff time, and staff time is invisible unless someone records it.
That is why agencies on flat retainers still track hours internally. The tracking is not for billing, it is for pricing. It tells you whether the scope you sold is the scope you are delivering, and gives you a number to bring to a renewal instead of a feeling that a client has become difficult.
This is a different problem from the one a freelancer has. A contractor billing hourly tracks time because the invoice is derived from it, so the hours are the deliverable, a case we covered in our look at invoicing tools for social media freelancers. The retainer case inverts it. The client never sees the hours. They exist so the agency can check its own arithmetic.
Hours logged is not the same report as client profitability
Raw time logging produces a total. On its own that total means nothing, because the number it has to be compared against lives somewhere else.
A per-client profitability report has three parts. First, hours logged against that client or project, which is what the free tiers give you. Second, money attached to the project, either a billable rate, an internal cost rate per person, or a fixed fee standing in for the retainer value. Third, a computed variance, the gap between what the project was budgeted to consume and what it actually consumed. Without the second part there is no third, and without the third you have a timesheet, not an answer.
Vendors draw their pricing lines along exactly that seam. Logging hours and viewing them by project is cheap or free almost everywhere. Attaching money to a project and reporting the variance is what the paid tiers sell.
Toggl Track, Harvest, and Everhour: where the paywall sits
Prices below were read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 5 September 2026, with the annual toggle in the state each page loads in.
| Tool | Tiers and published prices | First tier with budget or profitability reporting |
|---|---|---|
| Toggl Track | Free, $0, described as free for a limited number of users. Starter, $9 per license per month. Premium, $14 per license per month, footnoted as applying to the first year of Premium annual and renewing at $18. Enterprise, custom pricing. | Two steps. Starter first lists billable rates and project time estimates and alerts, described as planned versus actual hours. Premium first lists profitability analysis, Labor costs and fixed fee projects. The metric list is explicit: Free offers Time, Starter adds Revenue and billable percentages, and Labor Cost, Profit and Profitability appear only on Premium. |
| Harvest | Free, $0 forever, capped at 1 seat and 2 projects. Teams, from $9 per seat per month billed annually, listed as $108 per seat annually, or from $11 billed monthly. Enterprise, from $14 per seat per month billed annually, listed as $168 per seat annually, or from $17.50 billed monthly. Enterprise Plus, custom pricing. | Enterprise. The comparison table marks project estimates on all three published tiers and billable and cost rates on Teams and Enterprise, but profitability reporting, described as tracking margins by client, project, task or team, is marked on Enterprise alone. Custom reports are capped at four on Free and Teams, unlimited on Enterprise. |
| Everhour | Free, $0, for up to 5 seats, listed as limited features. Team, $8.50 per seat per month billed yearly or $10 billed monthly, minimum 5 seats. Custom, contact for a quote, minimum 50 seats. | Team. Free lists time tracking, projects and tasks, reports and data export, and the tooltip on its limited features line states that integrations, billing, budgeting, invoicing, time approval, time off, expenses and advanced permissions require the Team plan. |
On the add-on question, none of the three pages sells the profitability or budget report as a separate per-seat add-on bolted onto a cheaper tier. The gate is the plan itself. The fine print does add conditions that change the real number. Everhour bills a minimum of five seats on Team whether or not you have five people, so the floor for budgeting is roughly $42.50 a month at the yearly rate even for a team of two. Harvest states that the base seat rate covers core features and that additional invoices, projects, clients and tasks are billed on usage. Toggl’s footnote means year two costs more than year one at the same headcount.
Reading a profitability report against a retainer
The method is the same whichever tool you land on, and setup is where it usually goes wrong. Create one project per retainer client. Set that project’s budget to the retainer’s value, expressed either as the monthly hour allowance the price was built on or as the monthly fee itself, depending on whether the tool takes hour estimates, fixed fees, or both. Have everyone who touches that client log time to that project for one complete billing cycle, not a sample week, then open the budget versus actual view and read the variance.
Two outcomes come out of that. Under budget means the retainer covers the work with room left over: add scope as a goodwill move at renewal, take another client with the same team, or bank the margin. Over budget means the price no longer matches the delivery, and the choices narrow to renegotiating the fee, trimming scope back to what was sold, or deciding the client is worth carrying for a reason you can name out loud.
The report is only as good as the logging, and no tier of any of these tools can make a team log time consistently. If half the account managers record their client calls and half do not, an under budget result is meaningless and an over budget one understates the problem.
What to check before an agency switches tools for this
- How the feature is actually gated. On all three it is gated by plan tier, but the surrounding limits differ: Harvest caps free projects at two and bills extra projects and clients on usage, and Everhour enforces a five seat minimum on Team. Agencies scale by client count, so a limit expressed in projects or clients bites sooner than one expressed in seats.
- Whether the export preserves the client association. An export carrying date, duration and description but dropping which client and project the entry belonged to is not a history you can rebuild a profitability view from. Test it on real data before you migrate, not after.
- Who counts as a billable seat. If the view only works when everyone who touches the account logs time to it, then everyone who touches it needs a seat, including freelance editors and contract designers. Price it on the real number of people, not on full time headcount.
Before you pick one
The retainer profitability question and the freelance billing question look similar and buy different software. If the hours you track are the ones nobody bills, the table above is your market.
Prices in this post were verified on 5 September 2026 from each vendor’s own pricing page. This is not Watchdog data and it is not on the re-verification schedule, so confirm current pricing with the vendor before you buy. followedapp is published by the team behind RecurPost.
FAQ
If we bill a flat monthly retainer, why track hours at all?
Because the price was set on an estimate of hours or scope, and comparing logged time against that estimate, client by client, is the only way to know whether the estimate still holds. Not every agency wants to work that way. But the invoice reads identically in a light month and a heavy one, so the time record is the only thing that tells them apart.
Is a free time tracking plan ever enough for this?
Not on any of the three checked here. Toggl Track’s Free plan lists Time as its only available metric, with Labor Cost and Profitability arriving at Premium. Harvest’s comparison table marks profitability reporting on Enterprise alone. Everhour’s Free plan states that budgeting requires the Team plan. A free tier counts the hours that went into a client, not what they cost against the retainer.
Does per-client time tracking replace an agency’s approval or collaboration workflow tools?
No. Profitability tracking answers a commercial question about margin per client. Approval chains, client sign-off and collaboration answer an operational question about how work moves from draft to published. They are separate purchases with separate evaluation criteria, and a time tracker’s budget report has nothing to say about either.
Sources
- Toggl Track pricing, fetched 5 September 2026.
- Harvest pricing, fetched 5 September 2026.
- Everhour pricing, fetched 5 September 2026.