Compared honestly
Quarter Past vs Harvest
Harvest is a timer that turns into an invoice, and it is good at it. It also talks to Claude directly now. What it cannot tell you is how much of the week it missed.
Prices and facts checked 18 September 2026 · Quarter Past 2.3.9 · They change; tell us if one has
What Harvest is
Harvest is time tracking built around billing: one-click timers, daily and weekly timesheets, calendar imports, expenses, project budgets and polished invoices, on web, macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. A free tier covers one person and two projects, forever. Teams is $11 per seat a month billed monthly or $108 per seat a year; Enterprise is $17.50 monthly or $168 a year. Its entries record start and end clock times, not just totals.
It has an official MCP connection at api.harvestapp.com/mcp, so Claude, Claude Code, Cursor or ChatGPT can start timers, log hours, run reports, check budgets and draft invoices on your behalf. The assistant acts as you and sees only what your role allows.
What Harvest does better than Quarter Past:
- Invoicing and expenses built in, and genuinely good at both.
- Free forever for one person with two projects.
- Every platform, with team budgets, reports and forecasting.
- An official MCP connection: Claude can log your hours and pull your reports.
Side by side
| Harvest | Quarter Past | |
|---|---|---|
| How it tracks | One-click timers, daily and weekly timesheets, and calendar imports; entries record start and end clock times, not just a total | Asks what you have been doing every 5 to 60 minutes; one tap logs the interval that just passed, to the minute, with a start and an end |
| Reads your screen | No | Never. No screen-recording or accessibility permissions |
| Where your data lives | On Harvest's servers | A file on your Mac. No account, no server, no sync |
| Platforms | Web, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android | macOS 10.15 or later, Apple silicon and Intel |
| Price | Free for 1 seat and 2 projects; Teams $11 per seat a month, or $108 a seat billed annually; Enterprise $17.50, or $168 billed annually | £54, once |
| Cost over five years | $0 on Free; $540 on Teams for one person billed annually | £54 |
| Trial | 30 days, no card | 14 days, no card |
| Says how each entry was captured | No. A timer records what you started, whether or not you were doing it | Yes: every entry says whether it was measured live or recalled later |
| Plan against actual | Project budgets and forecasting, rather than a weekly plan set against your own record | Yes: a weekly plan set against the record, difference shown, nothing scored |
| What an AI gets | An official MCP connection: Claude, Claude Code, Cursor or ChatGPT can start timers, log hours, run reports and draft invoices. It acts on the record; it cannot tell you how much of the week never reached it | A written brief you read before you send it: the fortnight, the plan against the record, and how much of it was measured rather than recalled. You choose the assistant and the moment |
| Export | CSV, Excel, invoices, and integrations | CSV, and a full backup file |
| Teams | Yes; that is what it is for | No. One person, one Mac |
Prices from getharvest.com/pricing and the MCP description from Harvest's own help centre. Quarter Past facts from this site. Subscriptions are judged forwards: five years is what you will actually have paid.
Which one, honestly
Choose Harvest if
- You invoice clients and want the timesheet and the invoice in one place.
- You run a team with budgets to watch.
- You want an assistant that can log your hours for you, not just read them.
- One person, two projects, and free forever is enough.
Choose Quarter Past if
- The hours never make it into Harvest in the first place, because you forget.
- You want a record that says which entries were measured and which were reconstructed.
- You want one payment. Five years of Harvest Teams for one person is $540.
- You want the fortnight written up honestly, including what it cannot show.
What Quarter Past does not do
So that this page is worth trusting:
- Mac only. No Windows, no phone, no web version yet.
- One person. No team view, no shared projects, no manager reports.
- No invoicing, no integrations, no Zapier. It exports a CSV and stops there.
- Not on the Mac App Store, by choice; it is signed and notarised with Apple and downloaded from this site.
Try it for a fortnight. Decide then.
Free for fourteen days, no card and no account. If it earns its place, it is £54 once, paid from inside the app. If not, nothing to cancel.
Version 2.3.10 · 7 MB · macOS 10.15 or later, Apple silicon and Intel · Checked by Apple