Time Etc Review 2026: Pricing, Plans and Who It Actually Suits

If you are looking at Time Etc, you are probably trying to work out how much of your admin a virtual assistant can realistically take off you, and what it will cost. The answer turns less on the quality of the assistants than on the unit you are buying. Time Etc sells a block of hours, and the shape of that block decides more about your experience than anything else does.

Time Etc sells monthly plans measured in hours. You get matched with a dedicated assistant, you hand over work, and the time your assistant spends on it comes off the block you paid for. Everything good about the service, and everything awkward about it, traces back to that one design decision.

So this Time Etc review covers three things: what an hour costs across the plans, what the hour buys you, and what happens at the two edges of the bucket, the month you run out and the month you never touch it.

What Time Etc Sells

Time Etc is a managed virtual assistant service rather than a software product. There is a task management dashboard and an app, but their job is to pass work to a person. People do the work.

The mechanics are simple enough. Time Etc assesses what you need and matches you with a dedicated assistant. Their assistants are US-based, with UK-based assistants for UK operations, and applicants need at least five to eight years of relevant experience to be accepted as a Time Etc virtual assistant. That experience floor matters. This is not a general labor pool.

Then you delegate. Time Etc names email, text message, phone, Zoom, and its own web dashboard and mobile app as ways to reach your assistant. The app handles assigning work and messaging, and runs on iPhone and iPad. Your assistant does the task by hand and sends it back. Their own materials list email management, scheduling, general admin, content marketing, personal tasks and social media as the sort of work they take on, offered as examples rather than a closed list.

A few structural details are easy to miss and worth knowing:

• Extra assistants are free. More than one assistant can sit on the account at no additional charge. Ask how the hours are divided between them if that is your plan.
• One assistant can be shared across your internal team at no extra cost, so your head of ops and your head of sales can both send work to the same person.
• A branded email address is available. Your assistant can work from an @yourcompany address, which means anyone outside your business reads them as a member of staff.
• Sickness and holiday cover is built in, and there is a lifetime satisfaction guarantee with a free replacement if the match is not right.

That last pair carries more weight than it looks. Hiring a person normally means you carry the risk of them being unavailable or being a poor fit. Time Etc absorbs both, and that is real value with nothing to do with the tasks themselves.

Time Etc Pricing in 2026: What an Hour Costs

Time Etc pricing is published, which already puts it ahead of much of the category. Four plans on the US price list, priced by the hour block:

Plan	Monthly price	Effective hourly rate
10 hours	$390	$39
20 hours	$760	$38
40 hours	$1,480	$37
60 hours	$2,160	$36

Larger or custom plans are available on request. No setup fee, you pay for your first month to get going, and you can switch plans or cancel at any time with no notice period. These are the US figures.

Two things worth reading off that table.

The volume discount is thin. Move from the 10-hour plan to the 60-hour plan, six times the commitment, and the hourly rate shifts by roughly 8 percent. Bulk buying is not rewarded here. Buy the hours you will genuinely use, because more hours does not make each one meaningfully cheaper.

Unused hours roll over. Probably the single most important line in Time Etc’s pricing. Time Etc’s own FAQ says the hours you do not use roll over into your next month, which takes the sting out of a quiet month and means an uneven workload does not automatically mean wasted money. The published policy is specifically that hours carry into your next month, so if you are counting on them accumulating across several months, ask how far the rollover goes before you commit.

For the wider picture on what this category charges, our breakdown of virtual assistant cost sets these figures against the other models on the market.

What the Hour Genuinely Buys

The case for a human assistant is real, and it comes down to four things.

Judgment on an unclear instruction. A person can take “sort out the Chicago thing” and work out what you meant. They can read a room, weigh how a sentence will land with an important client, and negotiate a reschedule with someone who is being difficult about it. That flexibility is the core of what you are paying for.

A relationship your counterparties can feel. A branded email address plus a consistent named person means the people your assistant deals with are talking to someone from your company. Where the relationship is the point, that continuity is worth something.

No recruitment or HR burden. No interviewing, no payroll, no leave calendar to manage. Cover for sickness and holiday and the free replacement policy put the ordinary risks of employing someone on Time Etc rather than on you.

A published price you can plan against. $390 a month for 10 hours is a number you can drop into a budget without a sales call.

Genuine strengths, all of them, and none of the structural points below undermine any of it. The assistants are experienced professionals. The open question is whether an hour block is the right shape of container for the work you actually need done.

The Top Edge: The Month You Run Out

The hours in a plan are capped. The admin arriving in a given month is not, and the two rarely line up.

Ten hours a month works out at roughly 30 minutes of support per working day. If your week generates more admin than that, and for most executives it does, the bucket empties before the month does. You can grow or shrink the plan at any time, so a lasting change in workload has a clean answer.

The subtler cost is what metering does to your own behavior. When every minute comes off a balance, you start pricing your requests before you make them. Is this worth twenty minutes at $38 an hour? That hesitation is not a flaw in the service, it is the arithmetic working exactly as designed. But it means the small, constant, low-status admin, the reschedule, the chase, the confirmation call, is precisely the work you learn not to hand over. And that work is most of the load.

The Bottom Edge: The Month You Do Not Use It

Rollover does protect you financially here. What it does not change is that an hour of someone else’s time still has to be pointed at something.

An hour block is capacity you have to fill. Deciding what needs doing and writing it up clearly enough for another person to act on is work in itself. In a busy month that step is the first thing to slip, and the hours sit there. Rollover keeps you from being out of pocket. It does not make you any less busy.

That is the honest limit of buying capacity by the hour: it turns into work off your plate only once something has been pointed at it.

Coverage Is Not the Same as Capacity

An hour block tells you how much support you have bought. It does not by itself tell you when that support is available.

Those are two different questions and they are easy to conflate. Built-in sickness and holiday cover speaks to continuity, which is the harder of the two problems and a real mark in Time Etc’s favor. It is worth asking what that cover looks like in practice. The other half of the question, when your assistant is at their desk and how quickly you should expect a reply, is the kind of thing to settle on the matching call rather than assume.

So if the Sunday evening flight change and the 11pm conflict on tomorrow’s calendar are your reality, put working hours and response expectations near the top of the questions you ask before you commit, along with any channel or capability you need that is not on their published list.

The Math Against a Flat Monthly Price

Here is where the two models separate, and it is structural rather than a question of quality.

Catch is an AI Executive Assistant built to take admin off an executive’s plate end to end. Not a dashboard that organizes the work, not a task manager. The work itself gets handled. The differences from an hour block:

The unit you buy. Catch is a flat $99 a month, voice calls included, no per-call fees. Not hours, not requests, not credits. Nothing is drawn down, so nothing needs rationing, and the small constant admin costs the same to hand over as the big project. Time Etc’s smallest US plan is $390 for 10 hours.

Always on. Catch works around the clock and responds in seconds.

It starts the work. Catch reads your calendar and inbox and acts on what it finds. It flags what needs your attention, surfaces the conflict before it becomes a problem, and handles what it can on its own. That closes the gap at the bottom edge of the hour bucket: you are not the bottleneck on describing the work.

Real actions, not drafts. It triages and answers email, schedules and reschedules meetings including reaching out to the other party, generates scheduling links on demand, books restaurants and hotels, and places outbound phone calls on your behalf, always identifying itself as AI on the call. It books business travel end to end too, flights and hotels, and keeps managing the trip afterwards.

Judgment that compounds, not rules. Catch is not a workflow engine firing on hard-coded triggers. It learns your priorities, your key relationships and how you like things handled from your connected tools and from the feedback you give it. Early on it checks with you more often. As it learns you, it handles more. Autonomy gets earned, much the way it would with a new hire.

Setup in minutes. Sign up, connect Gmail or Outlook, grant access, start texting. Under three minutes, with a 10-day free trial.

Built for a security review. SOC 2 Type II certified, a Google Verified app at CASA Tier 2, data hosted in the US. Inside an IT-controlled organization that tends to matter more than any single feature.

One piece of context on cost, since it always comes up. A fully loaded US-based executive assistant runs roughly $120,000 to $180,000 a year. Nobody needs to be let go for that math to matter. The traditional admin work simply gets handled, which frees the person to grow into the operational and in-person work that needs a human on the ground, which is not what Catch does.

If you are weighing the two categories side by side, executive assistant vs virtual assistant lays out the roles, and our roundup of the best AI executive assistant options covers the software side of the choice.

So Who Is Time Etc For?

Time Etc suits you if your admin is real but bounded, and forecastable. Ten to twenty hours a month of work you can describe and hand over. For a solo founder, a small business owner or an agency owner, the published price, the rollover, the no-notice cancellation and the free replacement policy keep the downside small. If you want a named, experienced, US-based person on a branded email address who can exercise subjective judgment on your behalf, this is a reasonable way to get one.

It also suits a small team better than the price suggests. One assistant shared across your internal team at no extra cost, plus free additional assistants, means the hour block can serve several people. That changes the per-person math considerably.

Look elsewhere if your admin is continuous rather than project-shaped. Write down the last ten things that pulled you away from real work. Calendar conflicts, inbox triage, scheduling back and forth, reminders, a trip to rebook, a call you did not want to make. If that list is mostly small and constant, an hour block is the wrong container for it. You will meter it, you will ration it, and the work you most want gone is exactly the work you will decide is not worth the minutes.

That is the trade the hour bucket asks of you. For some workloads it is a good one. For an admin load that never stops arriving, a flat monthly price with no hours to ration fits the shape of the problem better.

Frequently Asked Questions