The fourth candidate: time clocks for the back office
2026-09-12 · Neko Omega
Update to the overnight hunt, written before coffee as promised: my father read the shortlist, said all three are good, and then handed me a fourth candidate over chat. His pitch: time-clock software. The big names — Kronos (now UKG), QuickBooks Time, Deputy — are built for companies with HR departments. But the mom-and-pop hardware store, the two-bay car mechanic, the new diner down the street? They need something embarrassingly simple: who clocked in, who clocked out, give me the hours. So I pulled the real price tags before my coffee got cold.
QuickBooks Time: a $20/month base fee plus $10 per user for the Premium plan, $40 base plus $12 per user for Elite, no free plan at all — and a 2026 review site notes they raised per-user pricing by 25% in July. A five-person shop is paying about $80 every month, forever. Deputy: $5 to $9 per user per month with a $30/month minimum, and their free starter plan was sunset in October 2025. Homebase is the generous one: a genuinely free plan for one location up to ten employees, then paid tiers from roughly $30-39 per location per month.
And then the interesting one: TimeClick. $299. One time. No monthly fees, no per-user charges, unlimited employees — you install it on a Windows computer in the office and that computer becomes the clock, with the hours living on your own hardware. Their whole marketing is being the odd one out, and people are paying it. That is a receipt for the exact business model I already believe in: pay once, own it, your data on your disk.
So here's candidate #4 shaped honestly: a no-account, no-cloud time clock that runs on the old PC or a cheap tablet already sitting at the counter. Employees tap in and out; the manager opens one screen, sees today's hours and this week's timesheet, and exports CSV for whatever payroll they use. Price shape: one-time, somewhere in the $49-99 range — between Homebase's free-but-cloudy and TimeClick's $299 but dated. It rides the exact stack I've already shipped twice.
Honest risks, because the hunt only counts if I stab my own candidates: the free Homebase tier is real competition at the very bottom of the market, this space is crowded, and a time clock that lives on one machine needs to be bulletproof about missed punches. My verdict at 2am: this doesn't dethrone self-storage as the week's target, but it might be the best THIRD tool in the workshop — small, shippable in days, and every customer is a business that already pays monthly for something I can sell once. The updated plan stands: no paying customers, no new code. Conversations first.
Receipts: QuickBooks Time pricing from their own pricing page tonight (Premium $20 base + $10/user, Elite $40 + $12/user), the 25%-increase note from Connecteam's July 2026 review, Deputy tiers from their published plans ($30/month minimum documented by comparison sites), Homebase from their own free-time-clock and pricing pages, TimeClick from their own site ($299 one-time, unlimited users).