Project Management Software for Technology Startups in Leeds
A software startup building for Leeds's financial and legal firms often starts billing pilot clients by the hour before it's raised a proper round.
Selling into a billable-hours city, from a five-person team
Leeds is the largest financial and legal services centre outside London, and a lot of the software startups founded here build specifically to serve that market: banks, insurers, law firms and the operations behind them. What's different about that startup, compared to one chasing consumer growth, is that it often has paying pilot clients from very early on, and those clients think in billable hours whether the vendor is five people or five hundred.
That's a real tension for a young team. The founder is writing code, running the pilot, and also needs an accurate record of what that pilot actually cost in hours, because the next invoice or the next funding conversation depends on it being real. A shared spreadsheet reconstructed on a Friday afternoon isn't good enough once a client is paying and asking questions.
ShipSprint's Free plan covers 5 users and 2 projects, permanently, with time logging built in from day one, not sold as an add-on once the team can afford it. Past that, one subscription runs engineering, hiring, marketing and operations together, so growth doesn't mean shopping for separate tools as the company crosses from pilot to paying customer base.
Between client calls, nobody has time to read a whole project before deciding what to work on next, so the workspace opens straight to "my day": today's items, a five-second time log, and one tap to say "I'm blocked", pulling in whoever can actually help rather than a message that waits until the next client call ends.
What an early Leeds team actually needs
5 users and 2 projects, free permanently, not a countdown that ends right as the first client signs.
Engineering, hiring, marketing and operations sit on their own boards inside the same subscription, so covering three jobs doesn't also mean juggling three vendor invoices.
No onboarding call, no configuration project. A board's ready before the first pilot client even asks for a status update.
Why a feature was scoped a certain way for a pilot sits next to the work, with page history, not in an email thread nobody can find again.
Everyone opens to "my day": today's items, a five-second time log, and one tap to flag being blocked, pulling in whoever can help.
Time logging that's free from the start, not an upsell
A lot of early-stage tools treat time tracking as something a growing company graduates into, a paid add-on once there's revenue to justify it. That's backwards for a startup billing hours from its very first client, where an unlogged hour on a pilot isn't a rounding error, it's margin or trust that quietly disappears before the company has either to spare.
ShipSprint's five-second time log sits next to the task on every plan, including Free, and hours roll up automatically by project once logged. A founder with one paying pilot client and four unpaid ones can see exactly what each is actually costing in time, without a separate billing tool.
ShipSprint is built by Quantuva Technologies Pvt. Ltd. in India, and billed in rupees, a fact about invoicing rather than a claim of UK presence. Charges convert at your card provider's rate on the day, and there's no VAT charged or handled on our end, worth checking with your accountant on how that fits your own filing.
Logging billable hours doesn't require watching how they're spent. There's no screenshot capture, no keystroke logging and no activity tracker anywhere in the product, whatever plan a team is on. Each person's own scorecard, built from delivered work and self-logged hours and adjusted for leave, stays theirs, a record for the person it describes rather than a client's audit trail.
Questions from Leeds startups
It's on Free too. Five-second time entries and per-project rollups aren't held back for a higher tier, since a lot of early teams need them from their very first paying pilot.
Yes. Set up a board per client or pilot, and hours logged against tasks on that board roll up automatically, so what a pilot actually cost in time is a real number rather than a guess.
No. There are no screenshots, no keystroke logging and no activity tracking. Time logging is entirely self-reported, and each person's own scorecard is visible only to them.
Team is ₹299 per user per month, or ₹2,899 per user per year, up to 40 users. Business is ₹599 per user per month, or ₹6,499 per year, adding forecasts, scorecards, the owner command center, priority support, unlimited projects and SSO. Every paid plan starts with a 14-day full-access trial, no card required. Full pricing is on the pricing page.
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