Why we built TimeTrack Pro on-prem instead of SaaS

Most time-tracking products are SaaS — Harvest, Toggl, Clio Time, QuickBooks Time. They're easy to sign up for, easy to invoice from, and your data lives on someone else's servers. For most teams, that trade-off is fine. For some — law firms, CPAs, staffing agencies, consultants under NDAs — it isn't. That's the audience we built TimeTrack Pro for. ## The on-prem trade-off TimeTrack Pro runs on your hardware: a Windows or Mac box in your office, a Linux server in your data center, or a Docker container in your private cloud. Your billable hours, client notes, vendor contracts, and retainer balances never touch our infrastructure. That gives you four real advantages: 1. **Data residency**. Client conversations about "where does my data live?" disappear. The answer is "on the same network as everything else you control." 2. **No phone-home**. Default licensing checks our server once a day; offline-customer mode skips even that. No telemetry, no usage analytics, no surprise feature toggles. 3. **Compliance posture inherits yours**. HIPAA, SOC 2 controls, "data stays on our network" client requirements — on-prem removes the conversation entirely. No SOC 2 audit to dig out for every prospect. 4. **One-time cost**. Pay once per tier. Optional $49/year maintenance covers updates and support. Renewal is optional — you can keep running the version you bought indefinitely. For a 10-person firm over 5 years, that's $6,000–$15,000 you don't pay in SaaS subscription fees. ## What we gave up Honesty: on-prem requires an install + ongoing patches + backups. We've made that as low-friction as possible with signed Windows installers, macOS launchd daemons, and Docker compose templates. Setup runs about 15 minutes per host. But it's not zero work. That's the trade-off. Your data stays yours. Your cost stays predictable. In exchange, you do an install. ## Who SaaS is the right choice for We're not anti-SaaS. If your firm doesn't care where data lives, has no compliance concerns, and prefers subscription pricing, SaaS time trackers are simpler — Harvest and Toggl are perfectly good products. TimeTrack Pro wins on data residency and cost predictability, not on feature breadth or signup friction. Pick the model that matches what your firm actually needs. ## Try it The live demo at [ttp-demo.quantumitpartners.com](https://ttp-demo.quantumitpartners.com) is loaded with a sample firm so you can walk through the workflows in a couple of minutes. When you're ready to install on your own hardware, [request the installer](/products/timetrack-pro/install) and we'll email a download link.