Clockify CSV export on the Free plan: what changed, and 3 ways to get your data out

If you just opened Clockify's Export menu and found CSV and Excel unavailable, nothing is broken on your side. CSV export is not working on your Free plan because Clockify moved those two formats to its paid plans in April 2026. PDF still works on Free. Here is what is gated, and the three routes that still get your time entries into a spreadsheet today.

The change

What Clockify changed in April 2026: the features that moved to paid plans

CAKE.com announced the change on 21 April 2026. The features it lists as moving to paid plans: Kiosk, billable hours, limited users, shared reports, project time estimates, and CSV/Excel report export.

Clockify's own help page on the update states it plainly: CSV and Excel report exports are available only on paid plans, PDF exports remain on Free. It also caps a Free workspace at 5 active users, 3 webhooks and 30 API requests per hour.

The one that catches people out: billable rates are paid now too. Clockify's update page is blunt about it: you can no longer set hourly rates or assign dollar amounts to projects, and once the trial ends and you stay on Free you will not have the Billable icon in time entries. No export route recovers a rate you were never able to enter — invoicing from a Free workspace means doing that arithmetic in your own spreadsheet.

Where you stand

What Free can still export today: PDF only, and a 31-day maximum per report

Clockify's export documentation gives the rule in one line: you can export data and download reports in PDF on the Free plan, or CSV/Excel on Basic or higher. Two more limits sit on top:

Date range. Clockify's wording: if you are on a Free plan, you can only export up to a maximum of 31 days or 1 month per report. More on the 31-day cap and what it does to a year of history.
Rows. The same page states a PDF file can contain up to 3,000 rows.

Route 1

Upgrade to Basic — what it costs, and when it is genuinely the right call

Clockify's pricing page lists Basic at $3.99 per seat, per month billed annually, or $4.99 billed monthly. (Quoted in USD; I could not confirm a euro figure on an official Clockify page.) Note per seat — a three-person team is three seats every month. Basic restores CSV and Excel export, customisable exports, billable rates, Kiosk and time import.

The right call when you need billable rates or project amounts. Those numbers do not exist on Free, so no API call and no add-on can produce them. If your invoicing depends on Clockify calculating amounts, pay for Basic and stop reading.

The wrong call when all you wanted was the columns already on your screen, in a spreadsheet. A per-seat monthly fee is expensive for a file-format problem.

Route 2

Export the PDF and rebuild the table by hand — where this breaks down

Free, nothing installed. Run a Detailed report, set the range, export PDF, copy the table into your spreadsheet. For one month, it is the fastest answer here. As a monthly ritual it breaks down in four predictable places:

One month at a time. The 31-day cap makes a year twelve exports to stitch together.
PDF tables do not paste as tables. Depending on your reader, a copied table lands as one column, or with columns silently shifted where a description wrapped.
Durations arrive as text. A cell reading 2:25 is not 2.42 hours until you convert it. Multiply first and the invoice is wrong but looks right.
3,000 rows per PDF. A team logging granular entries can hit that inside a month.

Route 3

Pull entries through the Clockify API as JSON

The API did not move to paid. Free workspaces still generate keys, and the API is not listed among Clockify's paid features — it is rate-limited instead.

The Reports API, and the caveat about exportType

Clockify's help page on exporting via API documents POST /v1/workspaces/{workspaceId}/reports/detailed, with an exportType accepting JSON, CSV, XLSX and PDF. On that same page Clockify states that export to CSV/Excel is a paid feature available in Basic plan or higher — asking that endpoint for CSV is asking for the gated thing by another door. JSON is not described as paid anywhere.

What I have not verified: I have no Free workspace to test against, so I will not tell you which HTTP status comes back for exportType: "CSV". The restriction above is Clockify's own sentence on its own API help page; the failure mode is worth two minutes of your own testing.

The simpler endpoint most people want

For a plain list of your own entries there is a base endpoint: GET /v1/workspaces/{workspaceId}/user/{userId}/time-entries. It returns JSON and takes start and end as ISO-8601 datetimes plus page / page-size. Clockify's help centre notes the default is 50 per page, and page size maxes out at 5,000 for base endpoints, 1,000 for report endpoints.

Your key comes from Preferences → Advanced → Manage API keys. Clockify does not offer read-only keys, so it carries whatever power your account has — if you own the workspace, use a member-level user. If you would rather write this yourself, the Apps Script version is here.

The ceiling

The 30-requests-per-hour ceiling on Free workspaces, and how to stay under it

Clockify's page on webhook and API limitations states that newly created workspaces on the Free plan are restricted to 30 API requests per hour, while workspaces on any paid plan keep the standard 50 requests per second. Thirty an hour is plenty for a monthly pull, hopeless for anything that polls.

Raise page size instead of paging. One request at page-size=5000 costs one request; the same data at the default 50 costs a hundred.
Bound the range. Ask for the month you need, not everything since 2023.
Count the fixed cost. A run is typically one call for workspaces, one for your user, one for projects, then the pages.
No live dashboards. A refresh every minute is 60 requests an hour. Daily is fine.

Without writing code

What HourSync does, and its status right now

Route 3 is the right shape and the wrong amount of work if you do not write code. HourSync is a Google Sheets™ add-on that runs it for you: paste your Clockify API key once, pick a workspace, choose how far back to go, and it writes one row per entry into a sheet named Hours — date, description, project, start, end, hours. Because it reads through the API, the CSV/Excel paywall does not apply. The €19/month subscription (14 days free, no card) adds filters, a Summary sheet and a daily refresh.

How to get it: HourSync is available now in Google Workspace Marketplace.

The trap worth repeating: HourSync has a Billable column and a billable filter, and on a Free Clockify workspace both are dead weight — the billable toggle is a paid Clockify feature, so there is nothing on Free for that filter to sort by. Do not buy Pro for that filter alone.

Every OAuth scope it requests, and where your API key is stored, are on the HourSync home page.

Ready to import? Install it free, then open any Google Sheets™ spreadsheet.

Try HourSync free for 14 days

No credit card. Your trial starts on the first import. Support: danibarbers13@gmail.com.

Decide

Which route fits which situation

The change removed two file formats from one menu, not your data. Your route depends on whether you also lost something only Clockify can compute — billable amounts.

Recommended route by situation
Your situation	Route	Why
Solo freelancer, Free workspace, invoicing monthly from a sheet	Route 3	A monthly pull is a handful of requests, nowhere near 30 per hour.
Solo freelancer needing billable amounts	Route 1	The data does not exist on Free, so no export route can produce it.
5-person team, everyone tracking, one person reporting	Route 1, or Route 3 carefully	You are at the 5-user ceiling, and 30 requests/hour is shared workspace-wide.
One-off migration, single month	Route 2	Nothing to set up. Convert durations to decimal before multiplying by a rate.
One-off migration, two years of history	Route 3	24 PDF exports and 24 pastes is not a plan.
Google Sheets, and you do not write code	Route 3, via an add-on	Same API path, none of the scripting.