In early 2026, Harvest — the time-tracking and invoicing tool we had used for years — raised its price from $12 a month to $117.50. That is an 880% increase, for software whose job is to count hours and send invoices. We decided not to pay it. We built our own instead. This is the story of Latinum.
The Bill That Broke It
Harvest was a good product. It tracked time, turned those hours into invoices, and connected to the rest of our stack through a Zendesk sidebar. For a small IT shop, that was most of what we needed.
Then the pricing changed. Our tier went from $12 a month to $117.50 a month — nearly a tenfold jump on a line item that had been trivial.
We could have shopped around, but every alternative had its own version of the same problem: subscription pricing, per-seat costs, and feature gates that move the moment you get comfortable.
Why Not Just Pay It
Paying would have been the easy call. We didn't make it, because of a shift in how we work that goes well beyond one invoice.
Over the past year we have been using our own AI tooling to replace the services we used to rent — in the literal sense, not the marketing one. Where a vendor charged recurring fees for something we could build and run ourselves, we built it. ArgusBoard replaced our MDM and reporting spend. Latinum replaces time tracking and invoicing.
Building our own also means the tool does what we need, not what a product team decided to prioritise.
What Latinum Does
Latinum is a self-hosted time-tracking and invoicing platform built for an MSP. The feature list is deliberately close to what we actually use:
- Time tracking: live timers and manual entries, by project and task.
- Ticket-to-line-item: a Zendesk sidebar app pulls ticket details straight into billable line items.
- Flexible billing: hourly, per-project, per-task, or no-fee work.
- Invoicing: one-off invoices from time entries, free-form, and recurring.
- Retainers: track and draw down prepaid blocks.
- Taxes: GST, PST, HST, and custom rates per invoice or line item.
- Payments: online payment collection through our payment partners.
- Reports: time, profitability, contractor, and invoicing reports, plus saved views.
- Client email: invoice sending with per-tenant templates and automatic overdue reminders.
- Integrations: a public API with per-tenant keys, and a Zapier app.
All of it runs on infrastructure we control, at zero software cost.
How It Works
The flow is deliberately short:
- A ticket closes in Zendesk.
- The sidebar app pushes the ticket into Latinum as billable line items.
- Latinum rolls those into an invoice with the right taxes applied.
- The client pays through our payment partners.
Under the hood it is a multi-tenant application: each business gets its own subdomain, data, and settings, configured through an onboarding wizard. The backend is a Python service, the dashboard a modern single-page app, and everything sits behind per-tenant authentication.
It is built to be boring in the best way — a small, well-tested service that does one job and does not surprise us.
Built Canadian
One decision mattered more than we expected: we wanted Latinum to be Canadian.
That starts with payments. We partnered with Helcim, a Canadian processor based in Calgary, for Canadian-based payment processing. For a Canadian business invoicing other Canadian businesses, that means local processing, Canadian-dollar handling, and a partner that understands the tax and interchange reality we operate in.
Latinum also supports international processors for clients who need them, but the default path is Canadian.
Why "Latinum"
The name is not an acronym. It is a reference.
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, latinum is the currency of the Ferengi — a rare metal measured in slips and bars, and in its most prized form, gold-pressed latinum. It is money that is hard to counterfeit and worth holding onto.
There is a rule from the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition we keep in the project docs: "Good customers are as rare as latinum. Treasure them." For an MSP, that is not a bad operating principle.
What We Learned
Building Latinum took about two months, from first line of code to running our own billing on it.
The hard part was not the code. It was finding the time to do it properly. Running an MSP means the urgent always outranks the important, and a tool you build for yourself is permanently at risk of being deprioritised. The discipline was in protecting those hours, week after week, until it was done.
The second lesson was scope. Latinum is not trying to be a product for the whole world, only to be exactly right for us. That constraint is what made two months realistic instead of two years.
We now run our own time tracking and invoicing, at no recurring software cost. What used to be a $1,410-a-year line item is a service we own and can change whenever we need to.
If your business is staring at a renewal that no longer makes sense, we build replacements for a living. Book a free IT assessment and we will look at what you are paying for, and what you could own instead.