A time clock is a long-term purchase. You don’t swap it every quarter — you install it, your team learns it, and it runs for years. So the honest way to compare a self-hosted vs. SaaS time clock cost isn’t the sticker price this month; it’s the total you’ll have paid three years from now, after your headcount has moved and the renewals have stacked up.
This is that comparison, done plainly, for a typical 25-person on-site team. No fake savings figures — just the pricing models laid side by side and the three-year arithmetic that follows from them.
The two pricing models, and why they diverge
The whole difference comes down to what you’re billed per.
- SaaS time clocks bill per seat. You pay a monthly fee for each employee (often on top of a base fee). Your bill is a function of headcount, so it climbs every time you hire and never comes back down on its own.
- Self-hosted tools bill per site. You pay one flat license for the software, and it runs on the WordPress site you already have. Add your hundredth employee and the price is unchanged.
For a small, stable team the gap is modest. For a growing hourly workforce, the two lines pull apart fast — because one of them is tied to headcount and the other isn’t. Three years is long enough for that divergence to become the whole story.
The SaaS side: three years of per-seat billing
Here’s the per-seat math for a 25-person team, using published rates for well-known SMB time clocks. All figures are approximate, as of June 2026 — vendors change pricing often, so confirm current rates before you decide.
| Tool (25 staff) | ~Annual | ~Over 3 years |
|---|---|---|
| Buddy Punch | ~$1,520 | ~$4,560 |
| Deputy | ~$1,950 | ~$5,850 |
| When I Work | ~$2,100 | ~$6,300 |
Two things to notice. First, these are starting three-year totals — they assume your headcount and the vendor’s prices both stay flat, which they rarely do. Every new hire adds a recurring per-seat line, and price increases at renewal compound across the term. Second, at the end of three years, you’ve spent several thousand dollars and you own nothing: stop paying and access to the tool (and often the convenient export of your data) ends.
The self-hosted side: a flat license on infrastructure you already run
Now the other model. Punchwell is self-hosted and priced per site: a free community tier on WordPress.org, then Pro at $99/year per site — flat, with unlimited employees on every tier.
The three-year totals:
- One site: $99 × 3 = $297 over three years. Each additional site is its own $99/year license.
That’s for the same 25 people — or 50, or 100. The number doesn’t move with headcount, because you’re not paying per head.
What about the “hidden” costs people rightly ask about with self-hosting? The honest accounting:
- Server/hosting: none extra. Self-hosted here means “runs inside the WordPress site you already operate.” If you have a WordPress site, you have the infrastructure — there’s no separate server to rent or cloud account to open.
- Setup time: real, but one-time and modest — installing a plugin and configuring your rules. Frame it the way you would any onboarding: an afternoon, not a line item that recurs every month.
- Renewal: the license renews annually, and the renewal price is locked as long as you never lapse — no surprise increase at hire #26.
There’s no per-seat meter running in the background, which is the entire point.
The three-year picture, side by side
Put the totals next to each other for the same 25-person shop over three years:
- Punchwell: ~$297 per site, unlimited employees, flat.
- Per-seat SaaS: roughly ~$4,560 to ~$6,300 and up, climbing with every hire — approximate, as of June 2026, confirm current rates.
The dollar gap is large, but the structural difference matters more than any single number: one model is a fixed, predictable cost you can budget for years out, and the other is a variable cost that grows precisely as your business does. If you plan to hire, per-seat billing quietly taxes that growth.
A quick note on WordPress alternatives, since “self-hosted” doesn’t automatically mean “flat.” WP ERP, the closest WordPress competitor, is self-hosted too but stacks up: its Pro tier plus a per-user fee plus à-la-carte Attendance and Payroll modules (each with its own recurring price) crosses $99/year at around three users — approximate, as of June 2026, confirm current rates. Self-hosting is necessary for flat pricing, but the bundle matters too. Punchwell puts everything in one flat annual price. You can compare the model against the maintained-fork landscape on the alternatives hub.
What you’re really buying with each model
Cost isn’t only the invoice. Two more differences ride along with the pricing model:
- Ownership. Self-hosted keeps your employee and timesheet data in your own database. Cancel a SaaS subscription and your data lives in someone else’s cloud; cancel a self-hosted license and you still have the plugin and every record.
- Predictability. A flat per-site license is a number you can put in a three-year budget today. A per-seat bill is a moving target that depends on hiring you haven’t done yet.
Neither point is a knock on SaaS as software — several of these are capable scheduling tools. It’s simply that the billing model, compounded over three years and a growing team, is where the real cost difference lives.
See the numbers for your own team
The three-year math is worth doing with your own headcount and growth plan, because that’s where a flat per-site license and a per-seat subscription visibly part ways. If you’d like to run it against a specific plan, the pricing page lays out the flat tiers, and the alternatives hub sets the model in context.
Punchwell is a self-hosted WordPress time clock and HR suite by Sturdyhaus — an independent, third-party maintained fork of the GPL-licensed “WP Human Resource Management” plugin. Sturdyhaus is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by wpspear, weDevs, the original author, or any competitor named here. Competitor names (Buddy Punch, Deputy, When I Work, WP ERP) are referenced descriptively only and belong to their respective owners. All competitor pricing is approximate, as of June 2026 — confirm current rates before relying on it.