Sunset of Time Tracker!?

Same, I am now looking for a new service.  Having to use two third party services to use a feature, that I use on a daily basis. And the core feature that made my choose HB as my service in the first place?  Having to use two separate services to do what was included, is not a solution. 

Please let me know of any other services too. HoneyBook has caused me so much anxiety for the last couple of days, with them just pulling the rug on what seemed to be an integral feature. Like, I’m panicking and losing valuable time looking for an alternative...

​@Herbert Miller - I shared this on another post with the same topic! I hope you find it helpful. 

I can understand why this change would be frustrating, especially if Time Tracking has been an important part of your day-to-day workflow. One of the biggest advantages of using an all-in-one platform is having everything in one place, so I can appreciate why adding another tool doesn't feel like an ideal solution.

If you do end up needing an alternative, I've personally had a good experience with Toggl for time tracking. It's simple to use and has worked well for tracking time across projects. I know others have had positive experiences with Harvest as well, so it may come down to which workflow best fits your business.

Hopefully others who relied on this feature will continue sharing how they used it and why it was valuable. Those real-world examples can be incredibly helpful for the product team as they evaluate future enhancements and priorities.

Alicia, can you reach out to me personally on how you integrated Toggle with HoneyBook invoicing? All the moving parts and pieces are confusing to me.

Same! I use time tracker daily. It was part of the reason I joined HoneyBook in the first place. It’s how I start every invoice every month. It seems so fundamental to me I’m just wondering how others are working by not using it. I’m a 1099 Marketing Consultant and while I do have retainer clients, I still track my hours daily to make sure I don’t go over or too under contracted hours. It’s definitely making me think - replace a feature? replace the whole system? Also with AI delivering on it’s promise to develop software -- this seems like such odd timing. Like how hard could it be to support the time tracker? 

​@Herbert Miller - I am sorry if there was a miscommunication. I use Toggl in my workflow but I have to manually invoice in Honeybook. I haven’t connected the two. I mainly use Toggl to track my time with projects as a whole so I know how I am spending my week, but i also use it when working on VIP Design days and one off projects to track time and bill hourly. It is a free tool and I do understand it is another app you have to incorporate but it has worked for me within my design business.

I really appreciate everyone who took the time to reply. HoneyBook has completely dropped the ball on this one.

I get email notifications whenever someone comments on this post, so if anyone comes across another platform that works similarly to HoneyBook, I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know. I'm open to recommendations and would be grateful for any suggestions.

I’m hopeful that someone in the product team & CS team is looking at this thread & able to see that they did not fulfill product 101 steps before sunsetting a core feature of their product. i’m sure there are other users who are experiencing the same frustrations with this haphazard announcement. i would hope that someone from the team would reach out to users to learn more about how we utilize their platform. 

Hey, I wanted to let you all know that I found a solution!

Being the nerd, I am, I built my own time tracker which dumps into a spreadsheet. That is unnecessary, as long as you have a time tracker app - even a free one.

The big one here, is that I finally figured out how to use the AI in Honeybook’s invoicing. I kept seeing on there that it was possible to create an invoice by giving it a prompt, but it didn't make any sense to me, and I was super frustrated. Jason at CodeKidz Studio, saw my post on here and reached out. He walked me through and with his help, I am excited about the new workflow. 

You have to be on the invoice, and add a Service, but before selecting a service, look at the right hand corner of THAT box where the trashcan and the drag arrow exist, and you will see a little AI icon. Click on that, and then use this prompt or something similar. To my happiness, it did precisely what I asked it to!!!!

Prompt: 

In this draft invoice, create separate service line items, one for each entry below. Do not combine or summarize them. Use the Service as the service name, quantity as hours, unit as hours, and unit price as the hourly rate. Use description as description.

Service: Created and scheduled Facebook/Instagram content for the library Description: July 1, 2026 Qty: 1 | Unit: Hour | Price: $50

Service: Supported the library's Monday drop-in tech help program Description: July 2, 2026 Qty: 1.5 | Unit: Hour | Price: $50

I am definitely late to this party. I do not remember getting any notice from HB that this feature was going away. When I could not log hours on a project this morning, I found a help article updated just one month ago detailing how to track hours, https://help.honeybook.com/en/articles/2209234-track-and-bill-your-hours. 

As I did not know the feature was going away, I also did not download my hours for this year.

Beyond frustrated. Stop shoving this garbage AI down our throats and keep the services we actually use. Extremely frustrated that I just lost all of my tracking on two projects. I thought the whole goal of HB was to offer a complete solution, and now you’ve taken away a critical tool and told us to look elsewhere. All of the other services out there are garbage. This was the only one that worked and did EXACTLY what it needed to. 

I’m more than frustrated and to know that their solution is recommending an integration app with Zapier is completely unacceptable knowing that they have the same working feature. HB this is garbage! Additionally, I should not have to upgrade my product to use a time tracker to add on to HB now that you have removed this feature. 

I’m just flabbergasted that HB dropped this feature without a heads up so that we could download the hours we’ve already logged and find a solution. I’m so shocked. I had pending unbillled hours on there that I now have to guesstimate which is horrifying. I would drop HB like a hot rock if I could but how to migrate to another solution without DAYS of work? Effing bummer. 

I just had a demo call with Bonsai (who was just acquired by Zoom) & will be cancelling my HoneyBook subscription in Dec & moving to them. They had all the features I need, was really easy to setup,  & were only $300 per year vs. the ridiculous $588 that HB now charges for reduced functionality. 

this is the perfect case study in product management & marketing/communication failures: 

• sunsetting the feature on a random day in Sept (when people have outstanding invoices & current clients they need to continue to bill until the end of the year). 
• no formal communication to users, only a tiny banner that was present in app for a week. 
• no warning to users that the timetracker would completely disappear & delete all your data. (luckily i did a mass export on friday afternoon, before it vanished today.) 
• no analysis of the heavy users of the feature & outreach to those users to ensure they were prepared for the sunset. 
• i emailed the HB CEO, product leader & neither of them responded to my email 

i’ll be happy to move on from honeybook as they truly lost their way as the preferred platform for solopreneurs 

Adding to this thread with a few things I'd like on the record…

Context on me: I'm a designer working with business owners across the country, and I have spent years defending HoneyBook to people who told me they outgrew it. I think that effort ends now. 

As of today, every hour I had logged and not yet invoiced is gone. Now I have to reconstruct client billing from memory and calendar entries, which means either shortchanging myself or guessing a number I then have to present to a client.

Three specific questions for the HoneyBook team:

1. Support told me there is "no way to retrieve the data" and, in the same message, that a work order is with engineering to retrieve the data. Which is it? Several of us in this thread are guesstimating billable hours for real clients right now. A straight answer matters more than an apology.
2. Support, in between a garage of copy+paste general responses, confirmed the notice was an in-app notification only, not an email. Was that a deliberate choice? A removal that permanently deletes customer billing records should include an email and, at minimum, a forced export prompt. You have my email address, and you use it for product announcements and all of your new AI-driven features.
3.  Is there any consideration of a billing adjustment for members who were paying an all-in-one price and now have to subscribe to an outside tool to replace a core function? My subscription was $512 last year. This year it jumps to $588. So I'm being asked to pay more for less, and then to go add Toggl or Clockify on top of that. It's a real slap in the face.

I'd genuinely rather stay. But "submit a feature request and let members upvote it" is not a response to deleted billing data. The feature already existed, and it worked. This is a joke.

We were not properly alerted. We were not properly warned. We were not properly considered. 

This will be my final quarter on the platform. I'm canceling my subscription and going through the long list of my own clients who had to leave HoneyBook behind. 

I hear Bonsai is a better move.

Thanks for letting us know about your Bonsai research, ​@Sarah Andrews . We appreciate it. I have a rather complicated setup to automate my various offerings so I’m not stoked to migrate but I’m so pissed off and shocked that I won’t continue to develop my business with Honeybook for now and will look into Bonsai. Best of luck.