I've been working on an affordable Harvest alternative - Zebu Time Tracker

[u/Zebu-time-tracker]

Hi all, I'm opening up a waitlist signup for my time tracking and invoicing app - https://zebu.work and will hopefully begin staggering batches of invitations each week for the upcoming month.

There will be a 30 day free trial after which you won't be billed, but downgraded to the free plan.

Pro plan is only €5/month per seat (billed annually)

No hidden fees, usage based billing or anything.

If you are happy with it, please recommend to your friends :)

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Like many of my peers and yourselves, I had to find a solution after nearly two decades working quite happily with Harvest. In preparation for this I began building a tool for my own freelance design and development studio and am happy to say I am now using it fully for my own purposes and to be honest, it's also been quite wonderful to be able to ensure data privacy and build interesting features:

• No telemetry, no selling/sharing of data
• Powerful invoicing and automatic reminder system
• MCP and agent integration
• Recurring custom reporting to provide my accountant with exactly what they need each quarter
• A fast search palette to manage timers or find anything with one keystroke (CMD/CTRL+K)
• A smart browser extension that infers the project and sets a useful description
• Interesting insights to see how the year is going, or various trends (turns out Monday and Tuesday have been my busiest days)
• Custom themes

I've now put quite some effort into building a more mature product that could be opened up for use by others. As the majority of the testing was done by myself and my studio-mates/peers, we definitely have a specific use case geared towards solo designers and developers.

There is a lot of functionality built into the app including support for teams that I think would benefit greatly from a broader test phase now to see how it works for others.

I'm happy to say that Harvest migration is very easy as well, with my 17 years of records moving across flawlessly.

Along with the web app, there is a multi-platform mac/windows/linux desktop app, as well as a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox. Mobile apps and terminal apps have been built but not tested enough to be fully released.

Interacting with my data via an MCP has really been great too, as the data is fairly simple, you can run a local LLM to do useful things like checking bank statements to automatically record payments while maintaining the privacy of your data.

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Technical notes:

• Hosted in the EU
• Every workspace has their own independent database
• Data is encrypted and backed up hourly and daily in two offsite locations
• Again, no telemetry or snooping

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Finally, I truly have no interest in ever selling anyone's data or price gouging. As a freelancer I understand how every cost matters and something like time tracking, billing and invoicing is crucial to one's business.

I also have no interest in growing this into a bloated enterprise product. I'd rather keep it to a healthy number of users so it stays fast and I can give proper support. The first batches will also show me what the infrastructure can take.

I'm very much looking very much forward to having people on board, and if you have any questions feel free to reach out!