ClaimHour

Positioning · Updated April 2026

Attorney time tracking app with no monthly subscription bloat: one job, done well

Open the comparison page of any major legal-software vendor and the marketing copy will tell you their attorney time tracker is "part of an integrated suite" that also includes case management, document automation, intake forms, conflict checking, a client portal, two-factor billing approval workflows, an in-app CRM, calendar sync, mobile apps for the partner and the paralegal, court-rules integration, trust accounting, and an LLM that summarizes your matter notes. Then they tell you the price: $89, $129, $159 a month, per user. Most US solo attorneys take one look and quietly close the tab. This is the page for those attorneys.

TL;DR

ClaimHour is $59/mo (Pro tier, most popular for hourly solos) and does one job: passive metadata-only capture of every billable call, email exchange, document-edit session, and calendar event in your day, surfaced as a two-minute end-of-day digest you approve and export. It exports to QuickBooks Desktop (IIF), QuickBooks Online (.qbo / CSV), LawPay (CSV), FreshBooks (CSV), or generic CSV. It never becomes a CRM. It never becomes a document manager. It never becomes a matter-spawning workflow engine. It never asks you to migrate your iCloud Drive or your Apple Mail or your Calendar inside our walls. The exit cost from ClaimHour is one menu item — Settings → Export All — that produces a complete data archive on demand, no subscription required to download it, no rate limit, no "premium tier only." The lean stack — QuickBooks Online Essentials ($65) + LawPay (free monthly base) + ClaimHour Pro ($59) — runs $124/mo total versus $159/mo for Clio Complete alone, while keeping your books in QuickBooks where your CPA already speaks the dialect. That is the entire pitch. There is no upsell to a "platform" tier because there is no platform tier.

The bloat tax in legal SaaS

Three taxes get baked into every all-in-one practice management subscription, and most solo attorneys are quietly subsidizing all three:

The cognitive-load tax. The first time you log into a full PMS dashboard, you confront a navigation tree with somewhere between forty and ninety menu items: Matters, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Documents, Notes, Time, Bills, Trust, Statements, Reports, Workflows, Templates, Settings, Roles, Integrations, Forms, Portals, and on. The cost of learning that surface is real even if you never use ninety percent of it. For a solo doing the actual lawyering, every additional click on the way to "save the eleven minutes I just spent on the Smith matter" is friction that makes the whole apparatus less likely to be used at all. The product that captures hours best is the one with the fewest clicks between the work and the entry. The lean version has none, because the capture is passive.

The integration-fragility tax. Every all-in-one PMS publishes a list of "integrations" — their calendar sync, their email plug-in, their QuickBooks bridge, their LawPay connector, their document-storage hooks. Each one is a moving part that can break in a vendor-side upgrade you didn't approve. Solos paying $89–$159 a month for a PMS find out, two years in, that the QuickBooks export started silently dropping the Service Item field after a vendor release, that the calendar sync stopped honoring time-zones after macOS Sequoia, that the trust-accounting reconciliation report shifted column ordering and broke their bookkeeper's import script. These are not exotic problems. They are the cost of operating a platform with thirty-plus moving parts. A lean tool with one input (passive metadata capture) and one output (a billing-system export) has materially fewer surfaces that can quietly degrade.

The exit-cost tax. The all-in-one PMS suites do not advertise it, but each one is also a data-residency play: your matters, contacts, documents, time entries, invoices, and notes live in their cloud. Leaving means a multi-week export-and-reimport project that no busy solo wants to do, which is exactly why the all-in-one model works as a business. The lean tool has nearly zero exit cost — your books are in QuickBooks (they were always going to be in QuickBooks), your trust money is in LawPay (it was always going to be in LawPay), your documents are in iCloud Drive (they were always going to be in iCloud Drive), and the only thing in the lean tool's own database is your captured-time history, which exports as CSV in one click. The exit-cost tax is what funds the all-in-one's marketing budget. We choose not to extract it.

What "lean" actually means in software (and what it doesn't)

"Lean" gets used loosely — startup vendors love the word because it sounds like "small and fast." It means something more specific here:

The features ClaimHour deliberately won't build

The list below is committed in the literal sense — meaning we have written down that we will not build these things, and revisiting any item requires a real rationale change rather than a sales request:

Feature we won't buildWhat we recommend insteadWhy we won't build it
CRM (contact pipeline, lead stages, intake forms)Apple Contacts + a simple Reminders list, or HubSpot FreeThe all-in-one PMS suites added CRM modules to lock you in deeper. Solos either don't run a structured pipeline at all or already have one elsewhere.
Document management (storage, version control, OCR, e-sign)iCloud Drive + Preview + DocuSign for signing onlyYour documents already live somewhere — moving them inside our walls just to bill against them is busywork.
Calendar (scheduling, two-way sync, court-rules-aware deadlines)Apple Calendar or Google Calendar + a court-rules service like CompuLaw if you need oneCalendar is a solved problem outside legal. Court-rules calendaring is a specialized vertical we don't have expertise in.
Conflict checkingA Word document or Numbers spreadsheet you grep before intakeConflict checking is a process-and-discipline problem, not a software problem. The Word-list method works for solos with under a few hundred active and historical clients.
Trust accounting / IOLTA reconciliationLawPay (or your bank's IOLTA tooling) with the three-way reconciliation report it producesBar-grievance risk on trust software is high. The right specialists already exist in this lane and we will not enter it half-credibly.
Matter intake workflows / client portalsAn online intake form via Typeform, Tally, or Google Forms; a shared Dropbox link for portal-style document exchangeAdding a portal feature pulls us into client-side auth, file storage, and access-control work — none of which is the job.
Invoice generation / templatingQuickBooks Online's templates, or LeanLaw / TimeSolv if you want a richer billing UIQuickBooks already generates invoices well. Building a competing invoice generator means duplicating something the customer already pays QuickBooks for.
An LLM that summarizes matter notesDon't — most solos don't take structured matter notes anyway, and the ones who do don't trust an LLM with privileged contentPrivileged content + cloud LLM = a privilege-waiver risk we won't assume responsibility for.
A "platform" tier with API access for third-party developersThe data is in a SQLite file on your Mac you can query directly with sqlite3A platform tier means we have to start versioning APIs, supporting external developers, and gate-keeping integrations. None of that helps a solo capture more billable hours.

If your honest assessment of your needs is that you actually want most of the items in the left column above, the right answer for you is one of the all-in-one PMS suites — Clio Manage, Smokeball, MyCase, PracticePanther, Rocket Matter. They are good products if the bundle matches what you need. ClaimHour is for the attorney whose honest assessment is that they want passive billable-hour capture and nothing else.

What it does — and stops at

The product surface, in full:

  1. Captures. Phone-call metadata (duration, counterparty, direction) from iOS Phone, macOS Phone, and FaceTime Audio via CallKit. Email-activity metadata (sent/received counts, subject-line tagging, response timing) from Apple Mail. Document-edit time across Word, Pages, PDFs in Preview, and Markdown editors via the Files API and process activity. Calendar-event correlation via EventKit. All metadata only — no audio recording, no email body storage, no document content storage. On-device, encrypted at rest with SQLCipher.
  2. Attributes. Each captured event is auto-attributed to a matter via counterparty matching against your matter list, document path, calendar event title, or a tagging rule you've set. Confidence score shown next to each entry; low-confidence entries get a manual-review nudge in the digest.
  3. Digests. End-of-day (or end-of-week) summary of captured events as a two-minute review queue. Approve, edit duration, edit matter attribution, reject. Approved entries enter the billable queue.
  4. Exports. One menu item, seven destinations: QuickBooks Desktop (IIF), QuickBooks Online (.qbo / CSV / future direct-API push), LawPay (CSV in their import format), FreshBooks (CSV), Bill4Time (CSV), LeanLaw (CSV — they sync to QuickBooks Online from their side), generic CSV with bar-standard 0.1-hour rounding.
  5. Exits. Settings → Export All produces a complete .zip archive of your entire ClaimHour database, no rate limit, no tier gate, no support-ticket requirement. The SQLite file underlying the app is also directly accessible at ~/Library/Application Support/ClaimHour/.

And that is it. There is no sixth item. There will not be a sixth item that turns this into a CRM, an intake-form builder, or a document manager. The roadmap deepens the existing five items — better attribution accuracy, more export targets, a native iOS app for in-the-car capture, bar-grievance-aware export modes — but does not widen the surface.

The lean stack vs the bundled-PMS stack

Two ways to operate as a no-PMS solo billing hourly. Both work; the trade-offs are real:

Lean stackBundled-PMS stack
ComponentsQuickBooks Online Essentials + LawPay + ClaimHour Pro + Apple Mail/Calendar/iCloudClio Complete (or Smokeball, or MyCase) — single subscription
Monthly cost$65 + $0 + $59 + $0 = $124/mo$159/user/mo (Clio Complete, April 2026)
Vendors to manage3 (Intuit, AffiniPay/LawPay, ClaimHour)1
Where matters liveQuickBooks Sub-customers + ClaimHour matter list (mirrored)Inside the PMS
Where books liveQuickBooks (your CPA already speaks it)PMS-specific ledger; CPA may charge a premium to work in it
Where documents liveiCloud Drive (or wherever they already are)Inside the PMS document module
Where trust money livesLawPay (with three-way reconciliation reports)PMS trust module (varies in audit quality)
Cognitive load on day oneLow — three independent tools, each does its one job; you already know two of themHigh — one tool with thirty modules; learning takes weeks
Switching cost if you leave one componentNear-zero — each component exports cleanly to standard formatsHigh — multi-week export and reimport project
Right answer whenYou bill hourly, want the cheapest right-shaped stack, value data residency in tools you already trustYou want one bill, one login, one vendor relationship, one place to look for everything, and don't mind paying the premium for that

The lean stack is roughly $35/mo cheaper than the bundled-PMS path and replaces vendor-managed convenience with stack-composer responsibility. For solos who already run QuickBooks and LawPay (which is most of them), the marginal addition is just ClaimHour. For solos who do not, the all-in-one path is genuinely simpler — and we will say so on a sales call.

When you should not buy ClaimHour

Honest list, because nothing erodes a lean product's credibility faster than telling everyone they need it:

Why this positioning is durable

The implicit question behind every "won't the all-in-one suites just add this?" objection is whether a lean product's wedge survives competitive pressure. Three reasons we think this one does:

Bundle economics work against unbundling. Smokeball, Clio, and MyCase each price the all-in-one at $39–$159/mo. Each could, in theory, ship a $19/mo standalone capture tool. None will, because doing so cannibalizes the bundle that funds their go-to-market. The unbundled price would have to land at $19/mo to be visible against ours, and the lost bundle revenue from the customers who would downgrade dwarfs the new revenue from solo lawyers who'd convert. We've watched this dynamic in adjacent verticals (Salesforce never cleanly unbundled its CRM even when smaller vendors out-shipped it on UX) and the math doesn't favor the incumbents moving.

The "no-PMS" identity is real. Roughly 30% of US solo attorneys explicitly bill themselves as no-PMS shops — the segment shows up in ABA TechReport data going back at least eight years and has been remarkably stable as a percentage. It is not a transitional cohort waiting to convert; it is a structural cohort with consistent reasons (cost, control, distrust of feature creep, accountant-fluency in QuickBooks). A product built for that cohort has a real and lasting market.

The exit cost is the moat. Lean products compete on having no exit cost. That sounds like the opposite of a moat, but in practice it builds trust capital faster than features do — the customer who knows they can leave without pain is the customer who tells their friends about you, because their reputation is not on the line if you turn out badly. The all-in-one PMS suites cannot match this stance without rebuilding their entire pricing and lock-in model. They will not.

Try the lean version

If your honest read of your practice is that you want passive billable-hour capture, exit-friendly data ownership, and the cheapest right-shaped stack — and you don't want a sixteen-module dashboard you'll never use — that is the product we built.

Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens. Starter $29/mo, Pro $59/mo (most popular for hourly solos because of bar-standard 0.1-hour rounding and unlimited captures), Scale $99/mo (two seats, for solo-plus-paralegal practice).

Get early access

Related questions

Isn't $59/mo for a single-purpose tool expensive?

Compared to a free Toggl tier, yes. Compared to Clio Complete at $159/mo, no. The pricing question is "$59/mo to recover roughly $1,500–$3,000/mo of currently leaked billable revenue, comparable to bundled-PMS capture at a fraction of the bundle price." Pro tier covers itself the first week most solos use it. The point of the lean positioning is not "cheaper than every alternative" — it is "right-shaped for solos who don't want the rest of the bundle."

What if I want one of the features you said you won't build later?

You'll graduate off the lean stack into one of the all-in-one PMS suites, and that's a valid path. The exit cost from ClaimHour is one menu item, your captured-time history exports cleanly, and you can re-import historical billable data into Clio / Smokeball / MyCase via their CSV imports. We won't try to keep you on the lean stack past its useful life. We also won't add the feature you want, because adding it would betray the customers who picked us specifically because we don't.

Does the lean approach mean less reliable software?

The opposite, generally. Fewer moving parts means fewer surfaces that can break in a vendor-side update; fewer integrations means fewer cross-vendor failure modes; fewer features means the engineering effort concentrates on the depth of the one job. Lean software's failure mode is "doesn't do enough"; bundled software's failure mode is "broken integration between two modules nobody owns end-to-end." Both modes are real; the lean failure mode is easier to recover from because you can swap out a single tool.

How do I know you'll still be around in three years?

Honest answer: we don't promise we'll be around in three years, because no startup honestly can. What we do promise is that your data exits cleanly the day you ask for it. The captured-time history is yours in CSV, the matter list is yours in CSV, the SQLite database file is yours on your Mac. If we shut down, your captured-time history is preserved and importable into any of the all-in-one PMS suites or the bolt-on billing layers (LeanLaw, TimeSolv, Bill4Time). The product is structured so the company-going-away risk is bounded.

What if my bookkeeper says they'd prefer the all-in-one?

Bookkeepers usually prefer QuickBooks because they're already fluent in it; the all-in-one PMS suites with their own ledger sometimes carry a learning premium your bookkeeper will pass through to you. If your bookkeeper is the one pushing back on the lean stack, ask them which workflow specifically they're objecting to — usually it's a familiarity preference for an interface they already use, which the lean stack actually preserves (your QuickBooks doesn't change). If they're objecting to running three vendors instead of one, that's a real preference but a billable-hours preference, not a quality-of-bookkeeping preference.

Will the iOS app come with the same lean positioning?

Yes. The iOS app is for in-the-car billable-call capture and end-of-day digest review on the phone. It is not going to also become a contact manager, an intake form, a document viewer, or a client portal. iOS users can already do contacts in Contacts, intake in a Tally form, documents in Files, and client communication in Mail or Messages. The iOS app's job is the same one job — capture and digest — on a smaller screen.

Further reading