Appearance
Pricing
Everyone on your team uses VERA. Everyone gets morning briefings. Everyone can log time naturally. No seat limits. No feature tiers. VERA is priced by your agency's revenue, not by how many people use it. For two reasons.
First, per-seat pricing punishes growth — the minute you hire someone you pay more for time tracking, and nobody should pay more for a tool because they hired someone. Second, the value VERA creates scales with revenue, not with headcount. A $2M agency has more retainers to track, more project margin at risk, and more month-end reconciliation to absorb than a smaller agency. That's what the price should reflect.
What VERA replaces
VERA is a consolidation of line items.
Your time tracking tool. Harvest, Toggl, Clockify, that spreadsheet nobody maintains. Your team logs time by describing what they did, in Slack, in their own words. No forms, no dropdown, no clock-in. VERA interprets the message and records the entry.
Your project management tool's financial layer. Mavenlink, Kantata, Productive, Scoro. The tools are fine at tasks and timelines; their financial intelligence is bolted on and their time tracking is the part nobody wants to use. VERA replaces the part that matters — the project margin view, the retainer burn tracker, the over-budget alert before it's too late to act.
Half of your bookkeeper's month-end. The two or three days spent reconciling timesheets, invoicing retainers, and calculating project margin. VERA does this continuously — every time a team member logs an hour, the margin updates. There is no month-end reconciliation because there is no lag.
The manual reporting pipeline. The Slack → spreadsheet → pivot-table → email → board-meeting pipeline. VERA publishes live dashboards to your reporting spreadsheet continuously. The board deck stops being a Sunday night project.
The mystery of where the month went. The feeling of closing your books and realising two projects ran over and nobody told you until now. VERA surfaces that signal in the morning briefing the day it starts, not the month after.
What this is worth
Scenarios sized for a typical mid-size agency. The dollar figures below are illustrative — grounded in the arithmetic of the work and twenty years running professional services, not extracted from a dataset. Your numbers will differ; the shape of the value holds.
The $30k fixed-price project caught in week two
Your team takes on a $30k fixed-price site rebuild. It's scoped for 200 hours. A PM logs normal hours. On day eight, VERA's morning briefing flags the project as pacing at 1.5x budget — the team is 60 hours in on what was meant to be a 40-hour phase.
You have a conversation with the client on day nine. Scope shifts, budget holds, or you add hours at rate. Either way, you've caught it before month-end, not discovered the loss in the P&L six weeks later.
The ValueA 200-hour project that runs 100 hours over, at a $150–200 blended rate, is $15k–$20k of margin you keep on a single project. Every agency owner can name the three or four of these that left them wondering it happened.
The retainer that was quietly losing money
You have an $8k/month retainer with a client you like. The team keeps delivering because they care. Nobody says anything. Three months in, you realise the retainer has been running at 140% utilisation the whole time — the team was eating $3k/month to keep the client happy. VERA's retainer burn view makes this visible in the morning briefing from month one. You renegotiate to $10k or reduce scope. The money stops leaking.
The ValueAn $8k retainer burning at 140% is roughly $3k/month of hidden cost. Catching it in month one instead of month three avoids the $9k loss — and the corrected rate preserves around $2k/month of margin every month after that. Over a year, in the order of $24k of margin restored on one account.
The half-hour a day nobody logs
Your team forgets the last 30 minutes. It's human.
VERA's evening check messages anyone under 8 hours logged. Most days it's a gentle nudge.
The ValueCeiling arithmetic: a 10-person team, 30 minutes of under-capture per person per working day, a $100 blended rate — that's ~1,250 hours a year, ~$125k of revenue never billed or reviewed. Real-world recovery is a fraction of the ceiling. Even a third is a quarter of a person's salary back per year.
The month-end that no longer eats three days
Your bookkeeper or finance lead used to spend two or three days at month-end reconciling timesheets, matching time to invoices, calculating retainer burn per client, and pulling the board meeting numbers. VERA does all of this continuously. The reconciliation is done the moment the month ends.
The ValueIn the agencies we've operated, month-end has consistently consumed hours of senior finance time. At typical bookkeeper or finance-manager rates, that's a considerable expense you stop paying for — and a calmer last week of every month.
The resourcing decision that used to be a guess
A prospect asks whether you can start a $40k project next month. The old answer was "let me check with the team" followed by a guess. VERA's capacity view tells you in one reply: three people at 95%, two at 60%, one on leave in week two. You say yes, delay, or hire — based on data, in the same conversation.
The ValueThe biggest cost here is reputational. Every agency owner has mis-quoted a start date, over-booked a team member, or turned down a good project because the capacity picture wasn't clear enough to say yes with confidence. Word gets around from unhappy clients and you lose sleep worrying that it could happen again at any time.
The contractor cost that wasn't in your margin
A freelancer agrees to deliver a piece of work for a fixed $5k fee. Your time-tracking tool logs their hours at an hourly rate, inflating cost in the P&L and showing a distorted margin. VERA's liability model treats the $5k as the actual cost — no more, no less — and reports margin correctly from the first hour logged.
The ValueThe number you base decisions on becomes the correct number. No arithmetic gimmick — just the margin line being correct.
Tier 1 — VERA
Everyone on your team. Morning briefings. Retainer tracking. Project margin. Capacity planning. Live reporting dashboards. All of it.
| Your agency's annual revenue | VERA per month |
|---|---|
| Under $500k | $199 |
| $500k – $1M | $399 |
| $1M – $2M | $699 |
| $2M – $5M | $1,199 |
| $5M – $10M | $1,999 |
| $10M+ | Let's talk |
Billed monthly. No annual lock-in. No seat limits. No feature tiers.
Weekly office hours, included
One shared hour a week. Drop in, listen, or bring a question — a retainer that's drifting, a month-end pattern that looks odd, a pricing decision that's stuck. Any Tier 1 client is welcome.
The format is deliberate. A room of agencies working through the same operating questions is more useful than a private call with one of us. Your retainer-burn question is a lesson for the eight other agencies in the room, and theirs for you. Cohort over consultancy.
This doesn't replace Tier 2's monthly 1:1 — that remains a dedicated operating session on your numbers, with nobody else in the room. Office hours is the shared layer underneath it.
Tier 2 — VERA + Operating Partner
Everything in Tier 1, plus monthly operating sessions grounded in your actual VERA data. We read the numbers together, apply the operating frameworks the product was built around — labour efficiency, The Bookend, command by intent, talent siphon — and decide what to change next month.
This is the part no other time tracking tool can offer, because no other time tracking tool was built by someone who has run professional services businesses for twenty years.
| Your agency's annual revenue | VERA + Operating Partner per month |
|---|---|
| Under $500k | $699 |
| $500k – $1M | $1,299 |
| $1M – $2M | $2,499 |
| $2M – $5M | $3,999 |
| $5M – $10M | $5,999 |
Fractional COO rates for professional services businesses run $3,000–10,000 per month, and that's before you've given them a tool to work from. VERA + Operating Partner is both.
First month at half
If you're not sure VERA + Operating Partner is worth the full rate, start at half. We set you up, run one operating session on your real numbers, and at the end of the month you decide whether to continue.
No auto-renewal. Continuing is a positive decision, not a forgotten one — we'd rather have you in month two because you want to be than because you didn't cancel in time.
Who you're talking to
I'm Tom Hart. I built VERA.
Before VERA, I spent two years as COO of North Street Creative in New York as an EOS Implementer®. On my way in, the agency was running at a 15% loss. On my way out:
- Revenue up 25%
- Labour efficiency ratio up 122%
- Utilisation up 23%
- The 15% loss turned into a 21% profit
- The first profit-based bonus the company had ever paid
Before North Street I worked in operations at Lemonade Creative, a Shopify agency, also in New York. Before that I ran Jolly Edition for a decade, a B2C business producing custom artwork for weddings. I started as a designer in the mid-2000s and worked my way through startups, in-house, and agency-side before the COO seat.
VERA isn't a tool I designed and then imagined agencies would find useful. It's the tool I wished I'd had in the COO seat. Every rule inside it comes from a decision I actually had to make — which retainer to renegotiate, which project to walk away from, which team member to have a careful conversation with. The arithmetic inside the product is arithmetic I used in spreadsheets, in the margin of notebooks, in Slack DMs at 11pm, to keep agencies out of trouble.
"Tom identified our real needs immediately, pivoting us from cutting expenses to generating sustainable revenue. He spoke our language without the usual consultant posturing and told us the truth without tip-toeing. That frankness is exactly why we hired Tom."
— Brian Chin, Co-Founding Partner, p3 Maine
Getting started
We'll set you up in a day and you'll have morning briefings by the end of the week.
Or email hello@getvera.site with a question first.