Clockify Free Lost CSV Export and Month-Long Reports
PDF export survives, CSV does not. Reports stop at 31 days. For a freelancer billing monthly that is survivable - for anyone reconciling a year, it is not.
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Clockify was, for years, the answer to "what is the best free time tracker" — not because it was adequate, but because it was genuinely generous. Unlimited users, unlimited tracking, real reporting.
That changed, and the changes land hardest on exactly the people who recommended it most: freelancers who bill by the hour.
The export change is the important one
"CSV and Excel report exports are available only on paid plans."
PDF export stays on Free.
That sounds like a minor format restriction and it is not, because PDF and CSV do completely different jobs.
A PDF is a document you send someone. It is a timesheet a client can look at, attached to an invoice, proving the hours. Fine for that.
A CSV is data. You import it into accounting software, you sum it, you check it against invoices, you keep it as a record you can still read when Clockify is no longer part of your life.
Losing CSV means losing the portable version of your own work history. You can still see your hours; you can no longer easily take them anywhere.
Thirty-one days
Reports are capped at a maximum date range of 31 days per report. Longer periods have to be run month by month.
Notice how precisely that limit is drawn. A month works. A quarter does not. A year does not.
Monthly invoicing is therefore unaffected, which is most people's weekly reality, and it is why many users will not notice this for a long time. You notice it in January, when you want to know what you actually earned last year and the tool will only show you thirty-one days at a time.
Twelve reports, each exported as a PDF because CSV is paid, and then you are reading numbers off documents to type them into a spreadsheet. That is the practical shape of this restriction.
Billable rates are gone
Free users can no longer set hourly rates, assign dollar amounts to projects, or mark entries billable. Time entries no longer show the billable icon at all.
So Clockify Free tracks time and no longer tracks money.
For a freelancer, those are not separable concerns. Tracking hours exists to produce an invoice. If the tool records 14.5 hours and you have to multiply by your rate elsewhere, it is doing half the job — and the half it stopped doing is the half that gets the arithmetic right when a project has two rates or a mid-year increase.
Five users, and automatic deactivation
Free workspaces are limited to five active users including the owner.
The mechanism is worth reading carefully: beyond that, "all subsequent users will be automatically deactivated" after the trial ends. Only the first four invitees plus the owner remain active.
Nothing asks you which five. If you are a freelancer with occasional subcontractors, the ones who survive are determined by invitation order rather than by who is on a project this month.
Everything is public
An underrated change for anyone with clients:
All Free projects are public. Every member can create clients, projects, tasks and tags, and "Permissions can't be restricted on the Free plan". Users can edit only their own time entries, which is the one guardrail that remains.
If you ever share a workspace with a contractor, every client name and project in it is visible to them. For most freelancers that is harmless. For anyone working with competing clients, or under an NDA that covers the existence of the engagement, it is worth knowing before you invite someone.
Clockify's own advice
The most useful line in the documentation is a recommendation rather than a rule: workspace owners should export the current year's time entries before the change.
Take that seriously. The article does not say what happens to existing time entries, or to the data of users who get automatically deactivated — we have listed both below as unanswered. When a vendor declines to describe what happens to your data and separately suggests you export it first, the suggestion is the clearer signal.
What is not documented
- What happens to existing time entries and project data when the plan changes.
- How the data of automatically deactivated users is handled, and whether it remains visible to the owner.
- Whether historical entries beyond the 31-day window remain accessible by any route other than month-by-month reports.
Still worth using?
For tracking time on a single-person workspace and invoicing monthly, Clockify Free remains a capable tracker, and PDF timesheets are perfectly good evidence to attach to an invoice.
For anyone who needs their hours as data — to reconcile a year, to feed accounting software, or to keep a record that outlives the tool — the free tier no longer does that, and the honest options are paying for it or moving.
Harvest's free plan draws its limits in a completely different place, and the comparison is worth making before you assume switching helps.
Questions people ask
Can you still export from Clockify for free?
As PDF, yes. Clockify states "CSV and Excel report exports are available only on paid plans", with PDF export staying on Free. That is a meaningful difference: a PDF is something you can send a client, while a CSV is something you can import into accounting software or analyse. For record-keeping, the format you want is the one that moved behind the paywall.
How many users can you have on Clockify free?
Five active users including the owner, so the owner plus four. Clockify states that beyond that "all subsequent users will be automatically deactivated" after the trial ends. A workspace can stay on Free by reducing to five or fewer active members.
Why can I only see 31 days in my Clockify report?
Because the Free plan caps reports at a "maximum date range of 31 days". Longer periods have to be run month by month. For monthly invoicing that is fine; for any year-end view it means running twelve reports and assembling them yourself.
Can you track billable hours on Clockify free?
You can track the time, but not the money. Billable rates were removed from the Free plan, so you cannot set hourly rates, assign dollar amounts to projects, or toggle entries billable - and time entries no longer show the billable icon. Calculating what you are owed becomes a spreadsheet job.
What happens to my existing time entries when the free plan changes?
The article we checked does not say what happens to existing time entries or project data, and does not say how deactivated users' data is handled. It does recommend that workspace owners export the current year's time entries beforehand - which is the clearest signal available about what to do.
Where this information comes from
Product details change often. Each item below links to the primary source we checked, so you can confirm anything that matters to your decision.
Spotted something out of date or incorrect? Tell us and we will fix it.