About Ceed

Jon McLachlan and Sasha Sinkevich, brothers and the co-founders of YSecurity and Cyberbase. Jon started in security at Apple and led teams at Pure Storage, UnifyID and Robinhood. Sasha built security from the ground up at Robinhood, Yugabyte and Symphony.

Because YSecurity kept its own books by hand, and one month ran tens of thousands of dollars past a client’s budget, found only when the invoice was written. Nothing the founders could find held an over-budget hour for a decision at the moment it was logged, so they built Ceed and ran YSecurity on it first. YSecurity runs on it today. The month in full is in Why we built Ceed.

YSecurity is a security consultancy that sells its team’s time, and Ceed is the record YSecurity built to run its own hours, client budgets, invoices, payouts and month close. YSecurity was the first firm on Ceed and runs on it today. Legally, Ceed is YSecurity, LLC, doing business as Ceed. YSecurity’s own work is at ysecurity.io.

Jon McLachlan and Sasha Sinkevich also co-founded Cyberbase. Jon hosts The Security Podcast of Silicon Valley, more than a hundred conversations since 2021 with the people who build and run security, and writes the Ceed blog. Before YSecurity, Jon started in security at Apple and led teams at Pure Storage, UnifyID and Robinhood, and Sasha built security from the ground up at Robinhood, Yugabyte and Symphony.

Because YSecurity ran its own books on Ceed before any other firm did, and because the record is built the way the founders spent their careers building. Who may see rates and margin is enforced on the server, not in the screen. Every edit before a month closes carries a name and a date, and a closed month sits on an append-only audit chain nobody can rewrite.

It holds the hour. The hour is saved, marked as held, and put in front of a named person for a yes or a no the moment it is logged. Approved, it goes on the invoice at the rate in the agreement. Declined, it stays on the record and off the invoice. Nothing is billed quietly and nothing disappears. Held. Not hidden. shows what the person who logged it sees.

An alert is a report. Harvest emails the morning after a budget is crossed, and Toggl Track and Clockify email within the hour, by which time the hour is already on the invoice or in the eaten pile. A block refuses the entry, as Hubstaff does and Productive can on a paid tier, so the work disappears from the record and the person who did it worked for free. A hold saves the hour, marks it, and waits for a named person to decide, so the hour and the decision both survive. Ceed holds.

Scope creep is work delivered beyond what the agreement priced, without a matching change to the price. It arrives as small requests, quick fixes and “while you’re in there,” and it is usually found at the invoice. In Ceed each client’s agreement carries a budget in hours, and the hour that would cross it is held for approval the moment it is logged. Approved, it goes on the invoice at the rate in the agreement, with a name and a date on the approval. Declined, it stays on the record and off the invoice. The long version is The agreement said 40 hours. The month said 47.

Over-servicing is delivering more hours than a client’s fee paid for and never billing the difference. Ignition’s 2025 survey of 273 agency managers and executives found that 57% of agencies lose $1,000 to $5,000 a month to unbilled work, and that 78% rarely or only sometimes charge for out-of-scope work. Most firms learn their own number when the month is gone. In Ceed the hour that would go over a client’s budget is held for a decision the day it is worked, so over-servicing shows up as a held hour rather than as a thinner month.

A retainer is a flat fee sized in hours only the firm knows. Ceed keeps that private budget for each client and checks every logged hour against it, so the owner sees the hours behind the fee and the client sees only what the agreement puts on the invoice. A flat retainer invoices as a flat retainer. Nothing about Ceed puts hours in front of a client who bought a retainer to stop thinking about them. They see the fee. You see the hours. is about that budget.

Yes. YSecurity itself bills in fifteen-minute increments against a monthly cap, and Ceed was built for that first. A block of prepaid hours, a co-managed client on a monthly hour plan, a project sold at an estimate and a flat retainer are all budgets in hours, and the hour that would cross any of them is held. An agreement priced per user or per seat needs no hour budget, and Ceed leaves it alone.

The account leader, an owner, or whoever the owner names decides, that day. The person who logged the hour sees that the entry is held and what it was for, framed as the client’s budget in question, never as their hour in doubt. The client sees what the agreement puts on the invoice, and hears about the extra before the invoice rather than on it.

Yes. Approve it inside the budget and it counts there. Approve it past the budget and it is billed at the rate the agreement names. Decline it and it stays on the record, unbilled. Each answer carries the approver’s name, the date and a reason.

From Slack, in about a minute a day. Each workday Ceed sends one Slack reminder with the hours left per client, and the hours are logged from there. There are no timers and no screenshots, and everyone sees their own hours. The same entries produce the invoice, the contractor’s payout statement and the margin per client, so there is no second sheet to reconcile.

No. Ceed watches each client’s budget, not the person. One Slack reminder a day, no timers, no screenshots, and everyone sees their own hours. A 2025 Buddy Punch survey of 534 non-management workers in the United States found that 30% feel time tracking is surveillance and 47% want access to their own records. Ceed is built for the second number. Every hour a team member works counts, and the only question is who pays for it. That one belongs to the owner.

From the agreement. A client’s agreement in Ceed carries the retainer or the monthly cap, the budget in hours, the rates by role, the rounding, the discounts, any yearly escalator and any equity taken as payment, versioned, with the signed paperwork attached to the version. Ceed computes the invoice from those rules and the approved hours, so the rate on the invoice is the rate in the agreement or an approved change with a name and a date on it. A month cannot bill until each person who logged hours has marked their month complete.

Yes. Shares taken as fees show on the invoice and in the record at the value the firm and the client agreed, and they count in the margin per client. No other tool on the comparison page has that row.

Ceed computes the contractor’s payout statement and the commission from the same hours the invoice used, so the invoice, the payout and the commission agree without a second sheet. Commissions follow the firm’s own policy and can be gated on the client’s rating. The firm’s bank or payment rail executes the payout from Ceed’s statement, and its payroll provider pays its employees.

Yes, every morning. Revenue, cost and margin for every client are computed from the booked hours, the rates by role and the cost of the people who worked them, and never extrapolated. They are visible to the owners and to whoever they name, and to nobody else, enforced on the server. Promethean Research found in 2026 that only 59% of digital agencies track margin by project. When the month closes, the margin is frozen with it.

The invoices, the statements and the margin for that month are frozen as a record, on an append-only audit chain, and nothing in it changes after. Every edit before the close sits on a trail with a name and a date. A dispute forty days later does not reopen the month. The correction is made in the open month, on the record, with who made it and why. Closed means closed.

Slack is built and is where hours are logged. Invoices and statements come out of Ceed as documents for the ledger the firm already uses. Ignition, Anchor, ConnectWise, Autotask and the project tools stay where they are, and Ceed is the record they all work from.

Payment terms live in the agreement and on the invoice, and the invoice is the firm’s to send and to follow up. What Ceed does is remove the surprise that starts most disputes: every over-budget hour was approved before it was billed, and the invoice matches what the client signed. The client paid late. The invoice was later. is about the rest of the wait.

Yes. Ceed Intelligence reads them: the people list, the W-2s and 1099s, the client list and the agreements, the timesheets and the invoice books. It proposes what it found, the firm confirms, all at once or row by row, and every record it added says so and opens the run that added it.

0.1% of what a firm invoices. No seats, no tiers, no minimum and no implementation fee. Invoice $200,000 in a month and pay $200. A month a firm invoices nothing costs nothing, and the rate never moves.

Because the fee should rise and fall with the firm. A month a firm invoices nothing costs nothing, adding a person costs nothing, and the rate never moves. The rest of the field prices by the seat or the tier: $4 to $18 a seat at the time trackers, $39 to $499 a month by tier at Ignition, $5 a payment at Anchor, and per seat with minimums and implementation fees at the suites, as of 11 September 2026 on the comparison page.

No. 0.1% of what the firm invoices is the whole price. There are no seats to count, no tiers to choose between, no minimum in a quiet month and no implementation fee. That is the pricing page.

Firms that sell their team’s time, from the day a second person logs an hour to a client, up to about fifty people. Ceed has a page for each of nineteen kinds: IT managed service providers (MSPs), security MSSPs, value-added resellers (VARs), IT consulting firms, security consultancies, software development shops, data and AI consultancies, staff augmentation firms, defense contractors, engineering firms, healthcare staffing, management consulting, accounting and fractional CFO practices, fractional executives, professional advisors, coaches, marketing and creative agencies, law firms, and global consulting firms. Each is under Industries.

Yes. Ceed is built for the day a second person, employee or contractor, logs an hour to a client. A fractional CFO, CISO, CMO or CTO with two contractors is exactly that firm. The principal needs to know what each retainer is costing, to pay the contractor from the same hours the invoice used, and an invoice that matches the agreement. At 0.1% of invoices, a practice invoicing $30,000 a month pays $30.

With a work Google account. Sign up, and the first sign-in creates the firm. There is nothing to pay until its first invoice. Ceed charges 0.1% of what the firm invoices, so a month with no invoice costs nothing. There is no demo and no sales call. Questions go to hello@ceed.so and a person replies.

No demo, no sales call and no form. The home page shows the product’s own screens, the held hour, every client’s budget this morning and the invoice computed from the agreement, and a firm signs up with a work Google account to see them with its own numbers. Questions go to hello@ceed.so and a person reads them and replies. The product itself is the conversation.