First Toggl, Now Clockify: API Limits on Free Accounts
In late 2025, Toggl drastically limited API requests for free accounts. Since April 2026, Clockify has followed suit. If you load your time entries from a free account into GrandTotal, you will quickly hit these limits – and it can happen to any free service.
Toggl: 20 requests per hour
In November 2025, Toggl introduced strict limits on API requests. These vary by subscription: 20 requests per hour on the Free plan, 240 on the Starter plan.
Once you reach the limit, this error message appears:
→ Go to subscriptions page
Clockify: 30 requests per hour
Clockify was long considered the generous counterexample. In April 2026, the provider cut back its free plan as well: free workspaces are limited to 30 API requests per hour – for the entire workspace, not per user.
At the same time, the free plan was reduced to 5 users, and features such as billable hours and CSV export are now only available on paid plans. Paid workspaces keep the previous limit of 50 requests per second.
What does this mean for GrandTotal?
Displaying your last 500 time entries in GrandTotal takes about 12 API requests. With a free account, you can therefore only load your times about twice per hour – and depending on the amount of data, the requests may not even be enough for a single load.
With Toggl, in one known case even upgrading did not help: a customer was still being throttled on the paid Starter plan. A reliable connection is not possible under these conditions – which is why the Toggl plugin was removed from the lineup.
Free is not a promise
A free plan is a marketing tool. It is meant to attract users who will pay later. If that bet does not pay off, the provider changes the rules – with no contract, no entitlement, no notice. Annoyed users who never paid anything are an acceptable loss. Toggl's error message says it openly: "Please upgrade to a paid plan."
Anyone who builds their workflows on a free account therefore always runs the risk of the service being cut back at some point. Within six months, exactly that has happened to two of the best-known time trackers – and whether it is time tracking, cloud storage, or email: no free service is immune.
What can you do?
If you want to stay with your service, a paid plan is the most reliable solution: with Clockify, for example, generous limits then apply again that make no difference in everyday use.
And when choosing a new time tracker, it is best to check from the start whether the provider's paid offering would also be an option. The free plan is fine for trying things out – as a permanent solution, it is a risk. GrandTotal imports time entries from numerous time trackers.