Time tracking
for software agencies
From the client's email to the Xero invoice. Your backlog is in Linear and your books are in Xero. What sits between them, which client asked for the work and how many hours it took against the retainer, is where a dev shop's margin goes.
No credit card. Free plan when the trial ends.
Four places the money goes
A dev shop on retainers loses margin in the same four places every month, and each one comes down to work being tracked somewhere that does not know what it is worth.
The request that never became anything
A client emails asking for a small change. Somebody does it that afternoon. It never becomes an issue, and it never reaches the invoice.
The issue nobody attributed
Work gets picked up off the backlog with no memory of which client asked for it. At month end you are reverse-engineering a client from a branch name.
The retainer that quietly went over
Nobody watching the cap during the month, so a 40-hour retainer takes fifty and you find out while writing the invoice, which is far too late to have a conversation about it.
The invoice rebuilt from memory
Somebody spends half a day turning three weeks of scattered work into line items a client will accept, and writes off anything they cannot reconstruct.
One loop, four stages
Linear owns the middle and Xero owns the end. Hour Cap keeps track of which client the work belonged to and what it was worth.
Forward your support address. Client email lands in a shared inbox where senders are matched to the clients synced from Xero, so a request arrives already filed and already assigned.
One click raises a Linear issue with a link card back to the client who asked. Set a Linear team per client and requests route themselves. When the issue ships, the conversation reopens with a reply drafted.
Timers and manual entries against clients and projects, with descriptions written while the work is fresh. Retainer and fixed-price caps fill in real time, warning you well before you cross them.
Approved hours push to Xero as a draft invoice, with your descriptions as the line item text, grouped per entry, project, date or team member. You approve and send from Xero as you do today.
Stages one and two are the Customer Support Inbox add-on at $12 a seat, bought only for the people who answer client mail. Three and four are the product.
What this deliberately does not do
It is not a project management tool. Sprint boards and roadmaps belong in Linear, and if your work lives there it should stay there. Every hour spent building a worse version of Linear would be an hour not spent on the billing side.
It is not a help desk either. There is no knowledge base or chat widget, and no AI agent answers your clients. Your inbound is a handful of named clients rather than a queue to deflect.
What it does is sit between those two tools and keep track of what the work was worth.
Once there are more of you
Frequently asked questions
Do I need Linear to use Hour Cap?
No. Linear is optional and plenty of agencies never connect a workspace. This page describes the full loop because dev shops usually already have a backlog, but the time tracking, retainers and Xero invoicing work perfectly well on their own.
How does this fit with our sprints?
Hour Cap does not try to run your sprints. Linear does that and does it well. Hour Cap owns the two ends Linear has no opinion about: where the request came from and what it was worth. Issues stay in Linear, hours and money stay here.
Can we track time against Linear issues?
Time is tracked against clients and projects, and a conversation linked to an issue carries that link, so the hours spent on a request are connected to the issue that came out of it. There is no separate per-issue timer to maintain.
How do you handle retainers that overrun?
You see it mid-month rather than at invoicing. A retainer has a cap, usage builds against it in real time, and the meter is visible while somebody is deciding how much effort a request deserves. Overruns become a decision you make rather than a discovery you have.
What about fixed-price work?
Fixed-price projects get a budget in hours rather than a resetting retainer. The same meter, the same warnings. It is the fastest way to find out that a flat-fee build is eating a month it was not quoted for.
Does it replace our project management tool?
No, and it should not. If your work lives in Linear it should stay in Linear. Hour Cap is not a task tracker, a Gantt chart or a sprint board, and adding those would make it worse at the thing it is for.
What does the whole thing cost?
A six-person agency on the Team plan pays $36 a month. Customer Support Inbox is $12 a seat on top, and you choose who gets one, so six seats is $72 and three is $36. At the full six that is $108 all in for time tracking, retainer budgets, Xero invoicing, the shared inbox and the Linear integration. Everything is free for 7 days first.
Free calculators for agency owners
See all free tools →Run the numbers before you commit. These model the profitability, utilization and rates behind agency work.
Agency Profitability Calculator
See your gross profit, margin % and effective hourly rate in seconds.
Open calculatorProject Profitability Calculator
Turn hours, cost and bill rates into project profit, margin and budget burn.
Open calculatorBillable Utilization Calculator
Find your utilization rate and the revenue you are leaving on the table.
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Every feature unlocked for 7 days, including the Customer Support Inbox and the Linear integration.