What Login-Free Time Tracking Costs, Read the Price

You are staring at a sign-up page, trying to figure out what happens to the bill when your volunteer roster jumps from 12 people to 60 for one weekend. That is the real question, and most pricing pages bury it. Here are direct answers to what a first-time visitor actually wants to know before creating a workspace.

How much does it cost right now?

It is free for your first 500 recorded hours, then $10 a month flat, with no card required to start. That is the whole answer for today. The pricing model behind it is a single flat price, meaning the number you would pay does not move with headcount. When you start a free workspace, you are not signing up for a trial that flips to a per-person charge after 14 days.

What does the flat price cover once it applies?

The flat price covers the whole team on one workspace, not a fixed seat count you have to top up. You get the admin dashboard that shows who is on the clock right now, all three ways for workers to record time, tags to label entries, worker groups to sort people by program or role, and CSV export for payroll or grant reporting. Nothing on that list is a paid add-on tier. The model is described in more detail on the Kangaroo Clock home page.

If I add more workers, does my bill go up?

No. Adding workers does not raise the bill, because there are no per-seat fees. A restaurant with 8 line cooks and a food bank with 200 rotating volunteers pay on the same basis. This matters most for the teams that swing hard by season: a tutoring center that runs 15 tutors in spring and 45 during summer catch-up, or an event crew that balloons for three days a year. You are not punished for a busy month.

Compare that to per-seat tools where a Saturday surge of one-day volunteers each becomes a line item. If you want to see how that math differs against other options, the comparison of alternatives lays it out.

Do my workers need to create accounts or download an app?

No. Workers never sign in, never create accounts, and never install anything. Only admins sign in, and they do it by magic link, so there is no password to reset either. This is the part that saves you the most setup time on day one.

Workers record time three ways, and you can mix them:

• Tap their name on a shared tablet at the door or the kitchen pass.
• Scan a posted QR code with their own phone camera.
• Open a personal link you send them, useful for remote or off-site help.

You can try all three from your phone before anyone shows up by opening the live kiosk demo. That tells you more in two minutes than any pricing table will.

What counts as a "worker," and does that number affect anything?

A worker is anyone who records time, and the count only affects your reports, not your bill. The CSV export includes a distinct-worker count, so a grant officer or restaurant owner can see how many separate people logged hours in a period without you tallying names by hand. That number is there for reporting. It is not a meter that charges you.

What do I actually get in the export, and can payroll use it?

You get a CSV with a stable column schema that does not shift between exports, so a spreadsheet or payroll clerk who imports it in March finds the same columns in September. Kangaroo Clock is not a payroll processor and does not move or hold money, so think of the file as the clean input your existing process consumes. If you need to convert those totals, the decimal and HH:MM hours converter turns 7:30 into 7.5 and back without hand math.

One export behavior is worth understanding before it saves you a headache. If someone forgets to clock out, the entry is auto-closed at its start time plus a cutoff you set, never at the current moment. So a volunteer who taps in at 9 a.m. and walks out without tapping again does not show up as a 14-hour shift. The auto-close rule exists specifically so a forgotten clock-out never inflates your reported hours.

Does it track location, take screenshots, or watch what people do?

No, and it never will. There is no GPS, no location tracking, no screenshots, no activity monitoring, and no facial recognition. This is a permanent design choice, not a feature that is coming later. A QR scan records that a person clocked in at a time. It does not record where they stood or what they did. For a volunteer coordinator asking people to donate their hours, that boundary is often the reason the tool gets adopted at all.

What is this not, so I do not sign up for the wrong thing?

It is time tracking, not scheduling, not payroll, and not client billing. It will not build next week's shift plan or send an invoice. If your list of needs includes shift planning, the solutions overview is worth reading so you can tell what Kangaroo Clock handles and what belongs in a different tool. Being clear on that now prevents a mismatch later.

The fastest way to settle the money question is to create a workspace and add a handful of names, since it costs nothing at launch and no one but you signs in. Do that, run one test clock-in from your own phone, and export the CSV. You will know within ten minutes whether the price and the setup fit how your team works.