Ever Gauzy and the invoice that bills you for sending it

A fifteen-person agency that bills by the hour can run its timers, its timesheets, and the invoices that come off them on a single server costing somewhere around fifty dollars a month, flat, with no meter running behind it. The same work on Harvest now starts at nine dollars a seat and then bills a second time for the invoices, projects, clients and tasks those timers produce. A UK consultancy told a trade publication its average monthly bill went from roughly $130 to $2,110 after the change. Ever Gauzy is the repository that does that job, it published three releases yesterday and two more this morning, and the catch is not the software.

What Harvest actually did

Harvest was acquired by Bending Spoons in July 2025, and the 2026 pricing restructure is the part that matters to anyone who tracks billable time for a living. The old model was the one everybody understands: a flat fee per person per month. The new model keeps that fee and adds a second one on top, tied to how much you use the product.

The plan fees themselves are not outrageous. Harvest's pricing page lists a free tier for one seat and two projects, Teams from nine dollars per seat per month on annual billing (eleven monthly), and Enterprise from fourteen (seventeen fifty monthly). Those are ordinary numbers for the category. What changed is everything sitting underneath them. Usage is now billed against invoices, projects, clients and tasks, either as a bill that moves with your activity or as a fixed usage charge stacked on the seat price.

Read that again with an operator's eye, because the structure is the story. A per-seat bill is predictable, because your headcount is a number you already know and already control. A bill that moves with how many clients you have, how many projects are open, and how many invoices you send does not track your headcount. It tracks your revenue. It goes up in exactly the months you would least like a surprise, which is to say the good ones.

Subscription Insider reported the consultancy case above at roughly a 1,500 percent increase, along with a US customer whose annual bill went from $2,800 to $23,000. Those are outliers and should be read as outliers. Most accounts did not move like that. But outliers tell you the shape of a pricing model, and this one has no ceiling that the customer controls.

One caution about sourcing, because it matters here. Search for anything about this change and the first page is almost entirely blog posts from competing time-tracking vendors, each of which happens to conclude that you should switch to them. That does not make the change fake. It does mean the loudest numbers you will find are being quoted by people with a product to sell, so the structure on the pricing page is the thing to trust, not the outrage around it.

What is actually in the repository

Ever Gauzy is a business management platform from Ever Co. LTD, sitting at roughly seven thousand stars after picking up about six hundred in a day. The README lists an enormous amount: ERP, CRM, HRM, an applicant tracking system, project and task management, sales pipelines, proposals, inventory, supply chain and production management, goals and KPIs, a help center, equipment sharing, multi-currency, multi-organization. Twenty-plus modules.

Treat that list as a brochure, because that is what it is. The better reading is the commit log. The last few days on develop are timer section improvements, a fix to employee team scoping, a fix to an employee filter that bypassed scope, and a correction to how daily plans resolve so a manager check can actually run. That is not an ERP company. That is a company grinding on time tracking and team management, which happens to be the exact module a services business would come here for.

This is the useful way to evaluate any sprawling open-source suite. The module list tells you what the maintainers hope it is. The commit history tells you which parts are alive. Here the alive part and the part you want are the same part, and that is the strongest thing on the repository's side of the ledger.

The release cadence is real too. The releases page shows v111.42.3 published this morning, with ten tags cut in three days. Nobody is going to accuse this project of being abandoned.

The tracking side ships as three separate desktop applications: a server build, an all-in-one desktop app, and a standalone desktop timer that handles time, activity and screenshots. There are prebuilt integrations listed for Upwork and, with a certain quiet honesty, for Hubstaff.

Standing it up, without the sales pitch

Here is where "free" starts doing work it cannot support.

Getting a demo running is genuinely one command. docker-compose -f docker-compose.demo.yml up and you have something to click around in inside twenty minutes. If all you want is to decide whether the interface is tolerable for your team, that is the whole exercise, and it is worth doing before you read another word about pricing.

Production is a different animal. The README's own production guidance asks for PostgreSQL 16, Redis, OpenSearch, and MinIO or an S3-compatible bucket, and then recommends running the whole thing on Kubernetes rather than Docker Compose. Compose is offered, and it works, but understand what you have agreed to: you are now operating a search cluster and an object store so that your team can press a start button on a timer.

Honest numbers. Somebody who has run Docker in anger before, who knows what a reverse proxy is and has issued a TLS certificate, will have this stood up properly in one working day, maybe two with backups and an upgrade plan. Somebody who has not should not make this their first self-hosting project. The demo is a Friday afternoon. Production is not, and any write-up that tells you otherwise has only ever run the demo.

The monthly bill is the easier part. A virtual server with eight gigabytes of memory, which is the realistic floor once OpenSearch is in the picture, runs about forty to fifty dollars a month at a mainstream provider, plus a few dollars for backups. Call it fifty to sixty all in. Against fifteen seats on Harvest Teams at annual rates, which is $1,620 a year before a single usage charge lands, the self-hosted version comes in around $700 a year in infrastructure. That gap is real, and it widens rather than narrows as you add clients.

There is also a middle option that most coverage of open-source alternatives forgets to mention: the maintainer's own hosted version. Gauzy's pricing quotes five dollars a month per additional employee on the Pro plan and ten on Enterprise, with a ninety-day trial. I could not pin down the base plan fee from the page itself, which tells you something about the stage this is at, and the README describes the hosted product at app.gauzy.co as being in alpha. For a business that wants the price without the server, that is worth a conversation with them rather than an assumption either way.

What Harvest does that this does not

Harvest has spent more than a decade on the unglamorous parts of billing, and those parts are where a replacement usually breaks. Accounting integrations that actually reconcile, payment rails attached to the invoice so a client can pay it in two clicks, a support desk staffed by people who have seen your problem before, and somebody else's pager going off at three in the morning.

That last one is not a joke. When your self-hosted timer is down on the last Friday of the month, the person who has to fix it before invoices go out is you, and the revenue waiting behind that fix is not hypothetical. A fifty-dollar server that fails during close week is not cheaper than a two-hundred-dollar subscription. It is a different risk, held by a different person, and the person is you.

The licensing is the cleanest part of the story, and worth stating plainly because it is usually where these articles go vague. The default license is AGPL-3.0, and for an agency running Gauzy internally to track its own people and bill its own clients, that imposes nothing you will notice. The network clause in AGPL only bites when you modify the software and then offer the modified version to other people as a service. If you are the customer rather than a vendor reselling it, you owe nobody anything. Ever Co. also sells a Small Business License for companies under a million in revenue and an Enterprise License above that, both of which exist so you can keep your changes proprietary. Those are for people building a product on top of it, not for people running their agency on it.

Who is holding this thing, and who is holding the screenshots

Ever Gauzy is maintained by a single company. Twenty-seven thousand commits and around four hundred open issues, all of it an Angular and NestJS monorepo, and if Ever Co. LTD stops, that is what you inherit. The version number is 111 and there is no long-term-support line, which is the other side of that impressive release cadence: there is no stable branch to sit on for a year while you ignore it. Shipping ten times in three days is a sign of life, and it is also a maintenance commitment you are now signed up for. Budget a few hours a quarter for upgrades and you will be about right.

Then there is the thing almost nobody raises when they recommend self-hosting a time tracker. The desktop timer captures screenshots and activity levels. Self-hosting does not make that data disappear, it moves it onto your server, into your backups, and under your name on the retention policy. Employee monitoring is regulated unevenly and sometimes aggressively, and an EU works council or a state biometric and monitoring statute does not care that you are saving money on seats. You have not reduced that risk by bringing it in-house. You have accepted it personally, and you should decide whether you want the screenshots at all before you decide where to store them.

For a lot of services businesses the right configuration is Gauzy for timers, timesheets, projects and invoices, with the screenshot capture switched off on day one. That gets you the cost story without the liability story, and it is the setup I would actually recommend to an ops lead who asked.

The part worth chewing on

Harvest did not get more expensive because tracking time got harder. It got more expensive because somebody ran the numbers and worked out that a business which bills by the hour will pay nearly anything rather than lose the record of its hours. That is a good read on the customer, and it is the reason the meter went onto invoices and clients instead of onto seats.

Every tool you rent is holding something like that. The question worth carrying into your next renewal is not whether there is an open-source version, because there usually is. It is which of your vendors has already noticed what they are holding.