Per-worker pricing vs flat team bands: what time-tracking apps actually cost a UK trade crew

By Laurentiu Niculescu · 12 November 2026 · 6 min read

A time-tracking app that advertises £4 or $8 per user rarely costs that on your bank statement. Once you add base fees, Pro tier upgrades for job costing, GPS add-ons, admin seats, and 20% VAT, a 15-worker crew can easily pay over £220 a month. Here is the side-by-side maths for UK contractors in late 2026.

Look at the pricing page of almost any time-tracking app aimed at construction or field teams and you will see a small number in big font: four pounds a user, or eight dollars a seat. That number is never what leaves your bank account at the end of the month. By the time a fifteen-person UK electrical or building firm adds the mandatory monthly base fee, upgrades to the Pro tier to unlock job costing, pays extra per head for the GPS geofencing or document module, and adds twenty per cent VAT on top, a tool that looked like forty pounds a month is quietly billing over two hundred.

Worse, per-seat pricing punishes the way construction actually works. When you have twelve regular operatives and bring in four CIS subcontractors for athree-week commercial fit-out, per-user software charges you extra the day they start and keeps charging you if somebody in the office forgets to delete their profiles when the job finishes. We built Temporra with flat team-band pricing and VAT already included so a twelve-person crew can bring on up to eight extra subbies inside the 11 to 20 worker band without their monthly bill moving by a single penny.

The four ways per-user pricing inflates a contractor’s bill

When we built Temporra alongside STF Electrics, we looked at the actual invoices UK trade firms were getting from American and enterprise workforce apps in 2026. The extra charges almost always hide in four places.

First, there is the base fee plus per-seat double charge. Apps like ClockShark charge a monthly base fee ($40 to $60 a month on annual billing, or $42 to $63 monthly) before you add a single worker, and then add $8 to $11.50 per user per month on top, billed in US dollars with card conversion fees.

Second, features that every site contractor needs are split across paid add-on modules. On Hubstaff, the base Team plan is $10 to $12 a seat, while job-site GPS geofencing sits inside a separate Locations add-on for another $3.33 to $4 per worker every month. On Deputy, the headline rate excludes VAT, and storing worker documents or certificates requires bolting on a separate £2 per user HR module. On Connecteam, once your headcount passes ten people (for example, when an eleventh subcontractor joins for a busy fortnight), time tracking with geofencing and worker document expiry live in two separate paid hubs ($49 to $59 a month each before tax).

Third, per-user billing counts the boss. In most per-seat systems, the director, the office bookkeeper, and the estimator each eat a paid monthly seat just to log in and export the Friday payroll.

Fourth, none of those American or hospitality-first tiers include UK Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) statements, UTR verification records, or site permits for hot work and working at height. You pay enterprise per-seat prices and still end up doing your CIS statements in Excel on Friday afternoon.

What a 15-worker UK trade crew actually pays in late 2026 (including VAT)

Here is the honest monthly maths for a UK contractor with 15 active site workers plus 1 office admin who needs GPS postcode geofencing, live job costing, document/CSCS expiry tracking, and payroll exports:

Why flat team bands fit subcontractor fluctuations

A retail shop has the same eight staff on the rota every week of the year. A construction or M&E subcontractor does not. You might run all winter with seven sparks on the books, pick up a school refurb in the summer that needs four extra CIS subbies for six weeks, and drop back down to eight workers in the autumn.

On Temporra’s pricing, you pay for a clean team band with VAT and every single feature included from day one: £39 a month for 1 to 5 active workers, £69 a month for 6 to 10 workers, £129 a month for 11 to 20 workers, and £239 a month for 21 to 50 workers.

If you sit in the 6 to 10 band at £69 a month with seven regular workers, you have three spare slots sitting ready in your band at zero extra cost. When you bring two subbies onto a site on Monday morning, you add them in thirty seconds, let them clock in inside the site’s GPS postcode geofence, generate their CIS deduction statement at the end of the month, and mark them inactive when their phase finishes. Your invoice from us never budges from £69.

Every feature in the box on the £39 plan

We do not run a Basic, Standard, Pro, and Enterprise feature matrix where small firms get a crippled app. Whether you pay £39 a month for four workers or £239 a month for forty, you get the exact same system:

Your crew get mobile and web clock-in in six languages (English, Romanian, Polish, Bulgarian, Russian, and Italian), plus Kiosk Mode so a whole site can clock in with a four-digit PIN on a shared tablet in the cabin. Every clock-in checks the site’s postcode geofence and an optional Face ID template match to stop buddy punching.

In the office, you get live job costing against project labour budgets, itemised client invoices generated straight from clocked hours, monthly CIS statements, one-click CSV payroll exports for Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, and BrightPay, CSCS card and certificate expiry alerts, and digital permits for hot work, working at height, and confined spaces.

Common questions

Does the owner or office manager count towards our worker limit?

No. The admin account you create when you sign up does not count towards your worker band. You only count the active operatives and subcontractors who actually clock hours on site.

What happens when a subcontractor finishes a job and leaves?

You mark their profile inactive with one click. All of their historical timesheets, invoices, and CIS statements stay safely on your account for your six-year HMRC and Working Time records, and their active slot opens up immediately for the next person.

Is VAT really included in the £39, £69, £129, and £239 prices?

Yes. Every price on our website includes UK VAT. If your company is VAT-registered, your monthly invoice shows the net amount and the 20 per cent VAT breakdown clearly so your bookkeeper can reclaim it on your next VAT return, making the net cost to a VAT-registered firm £32.50, £57.50, £107.50, or £199.17 a month.

Can we test it with our crew before paying a penny?

Yes. Every account starts with a 14-day free trial with all features unlocked and no payment card required. Set up a job, add your crew, and run two Friday payrolls on it before you decide.

Related guides

• Live Job Costing for UK Trade & Construction Teams
• Winning Main-Contractor Daywork and Variation Disputes
• Temporra vs ClockShark: UK Construction Comparison
• Temporra vs Connecteam: Pricing & Features Compared

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No card needed for the trial. One flat monthly price by team size, from £39 for up to five workers, VAT included. See pricing.