Quivva vs SEVRL
SEVRL is a practice management tool built by a fractional CMO, for fractional CMOs, CFOs and COOs. It is currently in private beta, free while the team builds with early users, with founding members getting half off for a year once pricing starts.
Quivva is a practice management tool for one person running a small number of retainer or engagement-based client relationships, built for fractional executives and independent consultants more broadly.
These are the two tools on the market built specifically for this audience rather than adapted from general freelancer or agency software, so this is a closer comparison than most on this site.
The problem this page is really about
Most tools aimed at “freelancers” assume an hourly invoice and a single client at a time. Both SEVRL and Quivva start from a different premise: you run several retainer relationships in parallel, you are not always billing by the hour, and the number that actually matters is not hours logged but what each client is worth to you once you account for the time it takes.
Where the two products diverge is in how much of the practice they try to cover, and what “tracking time” is actually for.
Pricing
SEVRL has not published pricing yet. It is in private beta, free for now, with founding members promised half off for a year once a price is set. That makes a direct cost comparison premature. Worth knowing, and worth revisiting once SEVRL prices publicly.
Quivva is US$15 per month, or US$144 per year. No tiers, no per-seat pricing, no beta waitlist.
Time tracking: a timer, or your calendar
This is the sharpest philosophical difference between the two products.
SEVRL tracks time from your calendar automatically. Its own framing is direct: “No timers.” The idea is that your calendar already reflects where your day went, so there’s nothing to remember to start or stop, and “over-servicing can’t hide” because the record builds itself.
That is a genuinely lower-friction approach, and it will suit anyone whose calendar is an honest record of their day. The trade-off is precision: a calendar block says what you planned to do, not necessarily what you did, for how long, or whether it ran over. If you double-book, work through a meeting, or the call runs twenty minutes long, the calendar does not know that unless you go back and edit it.
Quivva runs the other way: a live timer, one running at a time by design, linked to the retainer or milestone it belongs to as you work. It asks more of you in the moment, a deliberate start and stop, but the record is what actually happened rather than what was scheduled to happen. Tracking time on work you don’t bill by the hour is still the point, even on a flat retainer, because the hours are how you find out whether the retainer is still worth what you quoted.
Neither approach is wrong. If the idea of a timer is what puts you off tracking time at all, SEVRL’s calendar-based model removes that friction entirely. If you want the record to reflect reality rather than your schedule, Quivva’s timer does that at the cost of remembering to use it.
What each one covers beyond time and money
SEVRL is building out more of the practice than Quivva attempts to.
It includes contract management, MSAs and SOWs with built-in electronic signature, so you can send and sign an agreement without a separate e-signature subscription. It has a deliverables board, every task for every client in one place, with repeating tasks and checklists. And it has a lightweight pipeline for tracking engagements from first conversation to signed client, with close dates and expected monthly value.
Quivva does none of this by design. It has no contracts or e-signature, no task board, and no pipeline or CRM. The scope stays fixed on the loop that starts once a contract exists: time, retainers, invoicing and payment. If your practice runs on contracts you send from elsewhere and deliverables you track in a separate tool, that narrower scope will not bother you. If you want one system that also handles the sales conversation and the paperwork, SEVRL is doing more of that job today.
Billing: retainers vs logged hours, and the effective rate
Both products put the effective hourly rate in front of you, and both treat it as the headline number rather than a buried report. SEVRL shows “income, hours, and the effective hourly rate on every client, every month.” Quivva shows the same figure per client, alongside how it compares to your portfolio average, so you can see at a glance whether a given retainer is paying above or below what you’re earning elsewhere.
Where they differ is the billing model underneath. SEVRL generates one-click invoices “from a retainer or logged hours.” Quivva treats the retainer type itself as a first-class decision at setup: pay-for-work (hourly against a cap, the client is buying delivery) or pay-for-access (a flat fee regardless of hours, the client is buying availability). Fixed-price projects with milestones sit alongside a retainer on the same client. That distinction matters because fractional engagements are usually sold in days or a fee per month, not an hourly rate, and Quivva’s invoice and burn-down logic is built around that from the start rather than layered on top of an hours-based model.
Payments are the other point of difference worth naming plainly. SEVRL sends invoices “as a clean payment page” and takes no processing fee from your revenue. Quivva takes a more deliberate position: it does not process card payments for client invoices at all, and isn’t going to. At the invoice sizes typical for this audience, a few thousand to tens of thousands a month, bank transfer is already how most of these invoices get paid, so Quivva puts your bank details, including SWIFT/BIC and IBAN for clients paying from overseas, on every invoice rather than building a payment processor to route around card fees.
Tax: the one thing SEVRL doesn’t touch
SEVRL’s site makes no mention of tax. That is a reasonable choice for a product still finding its shape in private beta, but it leaves a real gap for this audience: fractional income arrives in irregular, contract-sized chunks, and figuring out what to set aside is a recurring source of anxiety independent of which invoicing tool you use.
Quivva applies your marginal and effective tax rates to income already invoiced this year, plus the contracted work still to come from your own forward capacity forecast, to give a running set-aside figure. It is explicitly not a tax return and not a replacement for your accountant or your accounting software, just the number to have ready before you talk to either.
Where SEVRL is the better choice
You want contracts and e-signature in the same place you invoice. Quivva has no equivalent and isn’t planning one.
You run a task board across clients. SEVRL’s deliverables board covers ongoing work item by item. Quivva tracks milestones on fixed-price projects but has nothing like a general task list.
You want your time tracked without touching a timer. If a timer is the reason you’ve avoided tracking time at all, SEVRL’s calendar-based approach removes that barrier entirely.
You’re tracking a sales pipeline. SEVRL’s lightweight CRM covers the period before a contract exists. Quivva starts once the contract is signed.
Which to choose
Choose SEVRL if you want contracts, e-signature, a deliverables board and a sales pipeline alongside your billing, and calendar-based time tracking suits how you actually work.
Choose Quivva if the record of your time needs to reflect what actually happened rather than what was scheduled, if you think about billing in terms of pay-for-work versus pay-for-access rather than hours-or-retainer, if getting paid from overseas clients by bank transfer matters, or if knowing what to set aside for tax before the bill arrives is worth more to you than a task board.
Both are built for the same person. The honest difference is how much of the practice each one is trying to run, and what each treats as the thing worth getting exactly right.