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2026-09-16

Clockify moved CSV report exports to paid plans: the exit test, applied

On 21 April 2026, CAKE.com announced that CSV and Excel report exports were leaving Clockify’s free plan. Clockify’s help page now says it in one line: “CSV and Excel report exports are available only on paid plans (PDF exports remain available on the Free plan).”

If you are leaving Harvest over its price and a free plan looks like the answer, read that line before you read the price. We wrote five questions to ask any time-tracking vendor about your data. Here they are, applied to Clockify’s free plan. Every answer comes from one of Clockify’s own pages.

What moved, in Clockify’s words

The announcement: “Once part of the Free plan, the following features will now be moved to Clockify’s paid plans: Kiosk, Billable hours, Limited users, Shared reports, Project time estimates, and CSV/Excel report export.” The free plan that remains allows “5 active users (including the Owner and active members)”, limits reports to “a maximum date range of 31 days per report”, and allows “30 API requests per hour and up to 3 active webhooks per workspace.”

1. Can I export everything, at any time?

Reports, no. On the free plan a report exports as PDF, and “you can only export up to a maximum of 31 days or 1 month per report” (Export reports). “A PDF file can contain up to 3000 rows.” That page’s route to a full export is the Detailed report with “the longest date range”, which on the free plan is a month. So a year of history is at least twelve PDFs. A PDF is a document to read, not a file your next tool can load.

Time entries, partly. One CSV is still on the free plan, and it is easy to miss. The free-plan page says: “Workspace owners can use the Export data option in Workspace settings to export all time entries for the current year as a CSV for legal compliance or record-keeping.” Clockify’s page on deleting an account puts the same tool under the Import tab of Workspace settings. There you “Enter which year’s worth of data you want to export” and click Export Time Entries.

So the two pages disagree on whether earlier years come out: one says the current year, the other lets you choose a year. Neither page lists the columns, or says whether clients, projects and rates come out as files of their own. Only the owner can run it, one year per export.

The test asked for the entries plus the clients, projects, tasks, people and rates that give them meaning, with no higher plan involved. The entries come close. The report export, the one whose fields include “billable rate, billable amount, currency”, needs the Basic plan or higher to come out as CSV: $3.99 per seat a month billed annually, or $4.99 billed monthly (Basic plan).

2. What happens to export after I cancel?

Clockify has a good answer to this one. Cancelling a paid plan does not close anything: “Once that period expires, your workspace will automatically switch to the Free plan” (Cancel subscription). And “Clockify stores your data indefinitely, until you delete your account, or delete your data.”

The data stays, but only the free plan’s exports stay with it: PDF reports a month at a time, and the owner’s CSV of time entries. A team that cancels keeps its history but can no longer export reports as CSV, so run those exports before the paid period ends. Deleting the account is faster and final: “Your account will be deleted immediately”, and “there’s no undo.”

3. Is there an API, and does it need a plan I would not otherwise buy?

The free plan has an API, so Clockify meets the letter of the question. Its guide to exporting through the API gives the limit: “If you are on a Free plan, you can only have 30 API requests per hour for the free workspace.” That is one request every two minutes. It works for someone who can write a script and leave it running. It does not work for a bookkeeper with a spreadsheet.

Import your Harvest account and read the reconciliation

Free for 2 people and 1 active project; $9 per active member per month after that, no usage fees on anything. The import runs on the free plan.

Import your Harvest data

4. Do the numbers survive the trip?

If you bill by the hour, the numbers that matter are rates and amounts, and that is where the free plan changed most. Billable hours are on the announcement’s list. The help page spells out what the rate restriction means: “You can no longer set hourly rates, assign dollar amounts to projects.”

Neither page says what happens to rates already set on a workspace that moves to Free, or whether the owner’s CSV of time entries includes them. If last year’s invoices were built on those rates, ask CAKE.com in writing before a free-plan export becomes your only copy. You can check a stack of monthly PDFs against a new tool’s totals, but only by hand, one month at a time.

5. Who owns the vendor, and what happens to pricing after that changes?

Clockify is a CAKE.com product, and the announcement gives the reason for the change in its own words: “As costs of maintaining a global infrastructure for an unlimited number of free users grow, CAKE.com, which is a 100% bootstrapped company, is focusing on remaining innovative and delivering quality service to our true investors — our paid plan customers.”

That is plainer than most explanations, and it is the reason to ask the question. A free plan’s terms are a line in its owner’s budget, and they change when the budget does. Harvest’s increase came from a different kind of owner, and we wrote up that owner’s record. Either way, what tells you whether to trust a vendor with your history is what leaving costs, in writing, before you need to leave.

If your hours are in Clockify today

  • If you own the workspace, go to Workspace settings, then the Import tab, then Data export, and export time entries for every year you have. The two help pages disagree about which years this covers, so open each file and check the totals before you rely on it.
  • If you pay and plan to cancel, export the Detailed report as CSV, with its rate and amount columns, over the longest range it allows, before the paid period ends.
  • Do not delete the account until those files are saved on your own machine. Deletion is immediate.
  • Ask CAKE.com, in writing, what happens to bill rates on a workspace that moves to Free.

Where Winnows sits on the same five questions, and where it does not

Our answers are on the exit guarantee: “full-fidelity CSV export on every report and on raw entries, plus a read-only API — always.” That applies to every plan, including the free one, with no row cap. Export and the read-only API stay available for 90 days after you cancel, at no charge. The guarantee rules out export paywalls and per-export fees in writing. The export guide lists what comes out.

One difference cuts the other way. Clockify keeps your data indefinitely after you stop paying. Winnows deletes an organization’s data once those 90 days are up. Both promises are written down, and they are different promises.

Since a Clockify user will look for these: Winnows has no browser-extension timer, no native phone apps, no invoicing (approved hours become invoice-ready lines for QuickBooks or Xero), no expenses and no SSO. Its importer is built for Harvest accounts. It is free for two people and one active project, then $9 per active member per month, with no fees on projects, clients, tasks or invoices.

Import your Harvest account and read the reconciliation

Free for 2 people and 1 active project; $9 per active member per month after that, no usage fees on anything. The import runs on the free plan.

Import your Harvest data