Construction Time Tracking App Cost: 2026 Prices by Crew Size

A construction time tracking app costs roughly $6 to $20 per user per month at list price as of 2026, and a few vendors add a monthly base fee of $20 to $63 on top. For a 25-person crew, that's about $1,800 to $6,000 a year before anyone has been trained on it. That's the honest answer to "construction time tracking app cost", and it's lower than most people expect.

The subscription is rarely the expensive part, though. The expensive part is the work the app doesn't do, and who ends up doing it by hand every Friday.

We pulled the numbers below from each vendor's own pricing page, not from review sites. If you want the feature-by-feature breakdown instead, we covered that in ExakTime vs ClockShark vs BusyBusy. This post is about the bill: what you pay over a year at different crew sizes, and what you pay later if you pick on price alone.

What the major apps list for in 2026

Every "from" price is the vendor's own wording. The entry tier is often missing the feature you came for, so treat the bottom of each range as a floor, not a quote.

Construction time tracking app cost by crew size

Per-user pricing means the bill scales with headcount. Annualized at list price, before any discounts or add-ons:

Two things jump out. First, base fees matter at 10 workers and barely matter at 50. ClockShark's base fee is a quarter of a 10-person bill and under a tenth of a 50-person one. Second, the spread between the cheapest and most expensive option widens as you grow. At 50 workers it's more than $8,000 a year between the floor and the top of this table.

What actually drives the number

Per user versus per company

Most of these apps charge per user. That's simple when your crew is steady and painful when it isn't. If you staff up for summer and back down in winter, ask each vendor how they count users: active this month, active ever, or contracted seats for the year. Annual billing at a seat count you only need four months of the year is the quiet way per-user pricing gets expensive.

Procore runs the other model. It charges by annual construction volume with unlimited users, so a big crew on modest volume can come out ahead. Its time product, Field Productivity, is the exception: Procore's own page says it's priced per full-time employee.

GPS and geofencing

GPS location on a clock-in is close to standard now. Geofencing, where the app restricts or flags punches outside a job site boundary, is where tiers split. Arcoro Time includes perimeter control on its entry plan. Workyard puts geofence-restricted clock-in on Pro and above, which means its $6 starting price doesn't include it. If the geofence is why you're buying, price the tier that has it.

Offline capture

This is the one we'd test hardest. Rural sites, basements and steel buildings kill signal, and an app that can't hold a punch until it reconnects produces exactly the missing time entries you bought it to prevent. None of the pricing pages we checked list offline mode as a line item, so you can't buy your way into it with a higher plan. Test it in the trial: airplane mode, clock in, walk around, reconnect, and check the timestamp and location.

Payroll integration

Exporting hours to a payroll system is common across all of these. Running payroll is a separate purchase. Arcoro's jump from $9 to $20 per employee is the cost of adding its own payroll. QuickBooks Time lists payroll sync, and the payroll itself is a separate QuickBooks product. Confirm the export matches the payroll system you already use, or the "integration" becomes a CSV someone reformats every week.

Certified payroll and prevailing wage

If you do public work, this is the line that changes the math. None of the pricing pages we checked for ExakTime, ClockShark, QuickBooks Time or Workyard list WH-347 certified payroll reports or prevailing wage rate splitting as a plan feature. They capture the hours. Someone still has to classify drive time between wage rates, work out blended overtime, and build the certified payroll report.

That gap is why we built PW Time Tracker. It handles the prevailing wage classification the general apps leave to a spreadsheet.

What the cheap version costs you later

The cheapest plan on the table is $720 a year for 10 workers. That number is real. It's also the number that goes on the budget, while the actual cost lands somewhere less visible.

The second system. If your app can't do certified payroll, job costing the way you bid, or multiple wage rates on one timesheet, you'll pay for another tool or another person's hours to cover it. Two subscriptions and a handoff between them is common, and the handoff is where errors live.

The Friday reconciliation. An office manager who spends a few hours every week fixing missed punches, reclassifying hours and re-keying them into payroll is a cost that never shows up on the software invoice. It's often the largest number in the whole system.

The contract term. ClockShark states that a three-year contract term applies to all its pricing plans. At 25 workers on Pro, that's a commitment of roughly $12,600 over the term at list price. Read the term before you compare monthly numbers, because switching later isn't free.

Per-user creep. Every hire adds to the bill forever. That's fine, it's how subscriptions work, but model it at the headcount you expect in two years, not today's.

None of this makes the subscription the wrong choice. For most crews it's the right one.

When an off-the-shelf app is the right answer

If you do private work, run one wage rate per worker, and your payroll provider already integrates with one of these apps, buy the app. Pick the tier with the geofencing you need, test offline mode in the trial, and you'll be done for a couple of thousand dollars a year. We'd tell you that on a call, and we'd mean it.

A build makes sense in a narrower case: you're already paying for a time app and a second tool or a manual process on top, because your work involves certified payroll, mixed wage rates, or job costing the app can't model. At that point you're comparing two subscriptions plus a person's time against a one-time build.

Our custom software projects run $5,000 to $30,000 and take 4 to 6 weeks. You own the code and the data, and there's no per-user fee, though hosting and ongoing support aren't free. If you'd rather your time data live in the same system as your customers, jobs and invoices, that's the territory of custom CRM development. We built that kind of single system for Grit Construction, where it took manual invoicing and reminders off the owner's plate and saved him 10+ hours a week.

How to price this for your own crew

1. Count your peak headcount, not your average.
2. Pick the tier with every feature you need: geofencing, the payroll export you actually use, and certified payroll if you do public work.
3. Multiply by 12, add the base fee times 12, and multiply by the contract term.
4. Add the weekly hours someone spends fixing and re-keying time today, at their loaded hourly cost, times 52.

If step 4 is small, buy the subscription. If it's bigger than step 3, the app isn't your real cost, and that's worth a conversation.

The next step

If you're weighing a time tracking subscription against a second tool, a spreadsheet, or a build, book a call with Ben. Bring your crew size and what you pay today. We'll tell you which row of the table you belong in, and if it's an off-the-shelf app, we'll say so.