Fourteen freelance tools, eight real free plans: what \"free\" actually caps

"Free plan" reads like a category signal, and it survives contact with the vendors' own pricing pages less well than the phrase suggests. Fourteen tools freelancers actually shortlist, checked against their published prices on 10 August 2026: eight have a plan that is free with no expiry, six have no free plan at all, and exactly one of the eight is unlimited on the records the tool exists to create.

That one is Wave, and it pays for the unlimited part somewhere else. On Wave's free Starter plan there are no automatic bank imports, no logo or brand colors, no late-payment reminders, and no way to invite an Admin, Editor or Viewer to the business at all. Not a limited number of collaborators. None. Those things sit behind Pro at $19 a month or $190 a year, which works out at $15.83 a month if you pay annually. Unlimited invoices, then, on the condition that nobody else ever opens the file and that you type in your bank transactions yourself.

Every other free plan in the set caps the primary record instead. The question worth answering is not which vendors are generous. It is which axis each one chose to put its cap on, and whether that axis is the one you use.

Free plans cluster where the marginal cost is close to zero

Sort the fourteen by what the product does and the split falls out immediately.

The eight with real free plans are time trackers and plain invoicing tools: Clockify, Toggl Track, Harvest, Wave, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Books, Invoice Ninja and Indy. These are the commodity layer. A stopwatch and a PDF cost close to nothing per account to run, the feature set is well understood, and a free tier is a cheap funnel into a paid one.

Every all-in-one client-ops suite in the set is trial-only. Dubsado gives 21 days, Bonsai 7 with a card on file that auto-converts, Moxie 14 with no card, HoneyBook and FreshBooks 30 each, and Bloom publishes a trial without publishing its length. The five published lengths add up to 102 days. After that the category costs money, without exception, which makes getting a real answer out of a trial shorter than one client cycle the whole evaluation problem in this half of the market.

This is not six vendors being stingy while eight are generous. Scheduling, e-signature, client portals, automated workflows and payment processing carry a real cost per active account whether or not the account pays, and the vendors that carry those costs have priced accordingly. The useful conclusion for a buyer is narrower and more practical: if the shortlist is "one tool that runs proposals, contracts, projects and invoices," a permanently free option is not a normal feature of that market, and a shortlist built by filtering for one will return the commodity layer instead.

The commodity end really is close to free, which is why Worklyn publishes eleven of the pieces as browser-based document generators that need no signup and produce no watermark. A one-off invoice or NDA has no recurring cost attached, so nothing is gained by charging for it.

What the eight free plans actually cap

One table, every tool, Worklyn included on the same terms. The last column is the cheapest paid plan, because the price of the first limit you hit is the number that matters.

Three notes on the sourcing, because they change how much weight the numbers carry. Toggl's five-user figure is not on its pricing page, which says only "a limited number of users"; the number appears on Toggl's own comparison page, and that is what the table cites. Zoho's 500-invoice limit is on the pricing page, while Zoho's knowledge base says the limits "are updated every year" and gives no figure, so treat it as annually revisable rather than fixed. And Harvest's restrictions on logos, imports and emailed invoices are documented in the help center, not on the pricing page a buyer reads first.

The modal free plan in this category, then: one seat, a hard cap on the primary record, unlimited secondary records, feature-gating on exports and bank connections, and a block plus an upsell when you reach the ceiling rather than anything being deleted. What varies is only which record gets the cap.

Worklyn sits in that table on the same terms as everyone else. Free is unlimited on clients, projects, proposals, contracts and invoices, and it is 1 GB of storage, CFO Mode reduced to Rate Check alone, and 1% of every payment you collect through it. On a year in which you collect €60,000, that 1% is €600, which is more than Pro at €19.99 a month would have cost you at €239.88. The free plan is genuinely free of a subscription and it is not free of a cost, and a post auditing other people's disclosure has no business burying its own.

Three tightenings and no loosenings in twenty-four months

Free tiers in this category are contracting, and it is checkable rather than a vibe.

Clockify published "Updates to Clockify Free Plan" on 20 May 2026. The free plan went from unlimited users to five. Billable rates, CSV and Excel export, shared reports, report ranges beyond 31 days, private projects and the ability to edit other people's time entries all moved to paid. What happened to workspaces already running more than five people is not stated on that page, so nobody outside Clockify can say.

Wave launched Starter and Pro in early 2024 and grandfathered its existing free businesses. Those businesses were emailed on 30 April 2026 and migrated on 1 June 2026, at which point they lost automatic bank imports and the ability to share the business with additional users. Wave's own wording: "As of June 1, 2026, your collaborators will not be able to access your account" without Pro.

Dubsado is a trial rather than a free tier, but the direction is the same. On 17 November 2025 the open-ended trial capped at three clients was replaced with 21 days, and the old arrangement is now labeled the "Legacy trial" in Dubsado's own help center.

No vendor in this set loosened a free tier in the same period. Three tightenings, zero loosenings, across two years, is the strongest single observation available here, and it has a practical consequence: a free plan is a current price, not a property of the product. What that means for the data you have already put in is a separate question, and mostly an undocumented one, which is what happens to your files when you stop paying covers in full.

The Dubsado number that half the internet still quotes

Dubsado used to offer a trial with no time limit, capped at three clients. You could run a small practice on it more or less indefinitely, and that is why it appeared in every comparison post. Since 17 November 2025 new accounts get 21 days. The old model is still in most of those posts.

This is not a Dubsado problem. It is a general one, and there is a second instance sitting inside this very article. Toggl's comparison page, which as of today is the only public place Toggl states its own five-user free limit, also tells readers that "the free plan allows unlimited time tracking and users" about Clockify. That stopped being true on 20 May 2026. The page is the source for one accurate number and one stale one at the same time.

So the honest instruction is not "trust this table." It is: check the vendor's pricing page yourself, on the day you are deciding, and read the help center for the plan you intend to use, because that is where Harvest's export restrictions and FreshBooks' archived-client rule live. Every claim above is linked to the page it came from precisely so you can do that in about ten minutes. Any comparison post older than a quarter, this one included, is a snapshot of prices that the vendors are free to change and demonstrably do.

Which limit binds first, and therefore which free plan is free for you

Four questions, in the order they eliminate options.

Does anyone else touch the account? This is the first filter because it is the most commonly hit and the most severe. Wave allows no additional users of any kind on Starter, and Invoice Ninja allows none on free. Harvest's free plan is one active person. Clockify and Toggl allow five, which is the entire reason they are the default in small studios, and Clockify's five includes the owner and counts pending invites. If you have a business partner, a bookkeeper or one subcontractor who logs hours, five of the eight free plans are already gone. Zoho Books is the interesting exception: its free plan budgets for one user plus one accountant, which is the only free tier in the set that anticipates your accountant existing, and it applies only under $50K of turnover. Team access is generally the axis vendors price on, which is why HoneyBook's $29 Starter includes zero team members, FreshBooks charges $11 per user per month, and Worklyn puts team members with role-locked financials on its €39.99 Business plan.

How many clients and documents a month? Count the last three months rather than estimating. Five clients is Invoice Ninja's ceiling. Three clients and three invoices a month is Indy's, which is 36 invoices a year, so two monthly retainers plus one project invoice fills it. Zoho Invoice's 500 a year is about 41 a month and will not bind for a solo practice. Wave and Worklyn are the only two free plans in the set that do not cap records at all. If your record count is small and stable, this filter costs you nothing and you should optimize on the next one instead.

Do you need data out? Since May 2026 Clockify's free export is PDF only, and billable rates are paid, so a free Clockify workspace can no longer produce a billable-hours report in a spreadsheet. Harvest's free plan cannot email an invoice or save it as a PDF unless Stripe is connected. Exports are cheap to buy and expensive to discover you lack: three people on Clockify Basic is 3 × $3.99, or $11.97 a month and $143.64 a year, which is roughly one billable hour.

Do you need bank feeds? Then no free plan in this set qualifies, and that is the cleanest finding in the audit. Wave removed them from its legacy free accounts on 1 June 2026, and Worklyn's feeds start at Pro. The cheapest published route to reconciled bank data among these fourteen is Wave Pro at $190 a year, which is the comparison actually worth running before you adopt a Wave alternative on the strength of its free tier.

The rule that falls out: a free plan is free for you when its cap sits on an axis you don't use. Single operator, under five clients, no exports, no bank data, and most of the eight will hold indefinitely. Add a second person and you are down to Clockify or Toggl. Add an accountant and, under $50K, Zoho Books. Add bank reconciliation and the free tier has ended everywhere, at which point the question becomes what the paid plan changes about your invoicing numbers, which is a measurable thing rather than a matter of taste. Decide in that order and you will not migrate twice.

Worklyn's Free plan is unlimited on clients, projects, proposals, contracts and invoices with a 1 GB storage limit and 1% on collected payments, so the cap you hit first is storage or the payment fee rather than the number of people you work for. If bank feeds or full CFO Mode are what you need, that is Pro at €19.99, and the table above is there so you can price the alternatives against it.