The tools I tried, and where each one hit a wall.
Let's be honest: this is the Bizily web site, so I'm going to try to convince you that Bizily is the tool for you. The best way I know how to do that isn't a feature list or a comparison chart — it's to just tell you the story of how, after trying everything else, I decided I had to build it myself.
I run a small consulting operation. Most of the time it's just me. But every so often a project needs an extra pair of hands, and I bring someone in to help. I didn't want to run one system for the normal day-to-day and switch to something else entirely the moment I needed to pay a subcontractor. That's a pretty ordinary need — but it turns out most of the popular tools aren't actually built for it. They're built for one of two things: tracking your own hours, or running a full accounting department. Not much lives in between.
Harvest is the one I have the most history with. I was on their free tier for a while, running a couple of genuinely lucrative projects through it, and I thought it was a really good product. No complaints about the tool itself.
The wall showed up when I went to add a second client. Harvest wanted me to jump straight from free to a paid plan — at the time, around $14/month, and per seat. Call me cheap, but I didn't want to hand over that kind of money for adding one client. And it wasn't really about the $14. It was what that pricing told me about where the product was headed: per-seat costs that only go up as you grow, and still no way for a client to log in and check their own invoice without me emailing it over. I could see myself outgrowing the free tier fast, and I didn't love what waited on the other side of that jump.
Toggl Track has, hands down, the nicest interface of anything I tried. Starting and stopping a timer feels effortless, and the reporting is genuinely a pleasure to use.
To be fair, Toggl does let you generate an invoice from a report — you can export one straight from your tracked hours, even on the free plan. But that's really as far as it goes. There's no recurring invoices, no payment reminders, and nothing to track whether a client actually paid or how much they still owe. It's an invoice generator bolted onto a time tracker, not a billing system. There was still no retainer billing, and nothing resembling a subcontractor payroll separate from client billing. I'd have been back to a spreadsheet for the parts that actually mattered to running the business.
Clockify's free plan is genuinely generous, and I respect that. But the features I actually needed were split across two different paid tiers — budget tracking on one, invoicing on the tier above that. What looks like the cheapest option on the surface turns into a per-seat cost climb once you need the parts that make it useful for running client work.
And even on the paid tiers, there was still no notion of subcontractor payroll separate from client billing. Same wall as Harvest, just at a different price point.
I should be honest about this one too: I didn't evaluate QuickBooks. It's real accounting software, built for people whose job is accounting. Mine isn't. I'm not a bookkeeper, and I didn't want to become one just to send an invoice and pay a subcontractor.
That's not a knock on QuickBooks — it's just a different tool for a different job. In fact, one of my clients has an accountant who uses QuickBooks for their books, and that accountant has her own login to Bizily so she can pull the reports QuickBooks needs on her end. Bizily doesn't try to replace that relationship. It just handles the day-to-day of tracking time, billing clients, and paying subcontractors — the part that was mine to do — and stays out of the way of whatever your actual accountant is already using.
After going through all of that, the shape of what I needed was pretty clear: time tracking and invoicing that's actually simple, plus the handful of things a small consultancy runs into that the simple tools don't handle — paying a subcontractor separately from billing the client, a rolling balance I can use as a spending limit against a client's funds, a running total on every project's budget, a place for clients to check their own invoices without me forwarding a PDF every time, and a currency label that isn't forced through USD for the client or two who've gotten creative about compensation.
That's Bizily. Not because it does everything — it very deliberately doesn't — but because it does the specific set of things I kept needing, and nothing else got in the way.
And the pricing follows from the same reasoning that got me here in the first place. I didn't build this to get rich — I built it because I needed it, and figured other people running the same kind of small, subcontractor-heavy operation needed it too. So it's free for your first client, and after that it's a flat rate per workspace, not per seat. Adding a teammate, or a subcontractor, or a client's portal login shouldn't cost you anything extra. That's not generosity, exactly — it's just that I remember exactly what it felt like to be quoted $14/month for adding one client, and I didn't want to be the one doing that to someone else.
