I priced out every time tracker I'd considered buying before I built one. The number that came back was uncomfortable.
Five years of Toggl Premium at the middle tier: about $540. Five years of RescueTime Premium: about $390. Five years of Timing Connect at the recommended tier: about $600. Rize at the $16.50/month tier: $990.
The Mac app I was going to use for one purpose — to look at a strip of color and figure out where the day went — was going to cost more than my actual MacBook by year five.
This is the part of the buying decision nobody walks you through. The monthly number looks small. The five-year number is closer to the truth.
Why subscriptions made sense (once)
Subscriptions aren't evil. They're the right pricing model for products where the company is doing ongoing work on your behalf.
A web app has servers that have to run 24/7. Those servers cost real money. The features keep changing because the web platform keeps changing. The customer support team has to be staffed even when you're not opening a ticket. Subscriptions amortize all of that.
Figma is worth a subscription. Linear is worth a subscription. Anything where data lives on a server and gets transformed by code that the vendor runs continuously — those are honest subscription products. You're paying for compute and uptime, not just the right to use the software.
But a Mac app that runs entirely on your laptop, sampling files in your own filesystem, writing to a SQLite database in your Library folder, and never opening a network connection — what is that subscription paying for?
What you're actually paying for
When I think about what it costs me to keep a Mac app shipping, the honest list is short:
- Code signing — about $99/year for an Apple Developer Program membership
- Notarization — included in the developer program; just compute time
- macOS API churn — usually one or two compatibility passes per year when Apple ships a new release
- Support email — depends on how loud the userbase is, but for a small app, maybe a few hours a week
- The occasional bug fix — folded into the rhythm of regular development
None of these are recurring at the scale that justifies $9/month per user. A user who pays once at $49 and stays on v1 for five years is well above the cost line. A user who upgrades to v2 at 50% off is doubly fine. The math closes without recurring revenue.
The only thing that wouldn't close is if I had a server doing work on your behalf. And I don't. There's no server. Block Timex with Little Snitch and it keeps working. That's not a feature I'm bragging about — it's a constraint that lets me charge once.
The Mac-app exception
There's a small but stubborn class of products that are honestly one-time purchases:
- TextEdit replacements (BBEdit, Sublime Text)
- File managers (Path Finder, Forklift)
- Window managers (Magnet, Rectangle Pro)
- Local utilities (Bartender, Hazel, iStat Menus)
- And — I'd argue — local time trackers
What these have in common: the binary on your Mac delivers the value. Not a server. Not an account. Not a team behind a dashboard reviewing your output. The software, once shipped, does the work for as long as macOS keeps it loadable.
Charging monthly for that kind of software has always felt slightly off. The way it usually plays out is that the vendor invents reasons to charge monthly — cloud sync, analytics dashboards, AI insights — and over time the product drifts away from being a useful local tool into being a thin client for an upstream service. That's the trap.
What we give up by charging once
I want to be honest about the trade.
When you charge a subscription, you can fund a team. You can hire someone whose only job is to maintain the iOS app. You can pay for compliance audits. You can build a customer success function. You can fly to conferences and host webinars.
When you charge once, you can't.
That means Timex won't have a polished mobile companion next year. It won't have a SOC 2 attestation. It won't have a sales team. It won't have a "team plan" with a dashboard for your manager. If those are dealbreakers, Timing or Toggl are probably the right tools.
But if what you actually want is a small, focused Mac app that does one thing well — and the thing it does is on your Mac, not on someone else's server — then you don't need any of those things. You need a sharp tool and a clean exit.
What "clean exit" means here
This is the part I cared most about while building.
If I get hit by a bus next year, the company gets acquired, the website goes offline, or Apple changes the rules under our feet — what happens to you?
With a subscription tracker, the answer is brutal. Stop paying, lose access. Your historical data sits behind their login. If they shut down, your years of data goes with them. The hours your kid was a baby and you tracked your screen time. Gone.
With Timex, the answer is boring: your last installed version keeps working. The file is at ~/Library/Application Support/io.muvon.timex/timex.sqlite. Any SQLite tool reads it. Run a query. Export to CSV. Pipe it into DuckDB. The format predates most of the products you've ever subscribed to and will outlive them all.
This is what one-time purchase actually buys: a tool that survives the company that built it.
The five-year comparison
For people who like numbers in tables, here it is. I priced the middle plan of each (not the cheapest, not the enterprise tier — the one most paying users actually pick).
| Tool | Monthly | 5-year cost | What happens if the vendor goes away |
|---|---|---|---|
| Timex | $0 | $49 total (or $24.50 with launch promo) | Your last version keeps working forever |
| Toggl Premium | $9 | $540 | Account locks, historical data behind login |
| RescueTime Premium | $6.50 | $390 | Account locks, historical data behind login |
| Timing Connect | $10 | $600 | Local tool, but cloud features and updates stop |
| Rize | $16.50 | $990 | Account locks, no offline use |
You can run those numbers at different tiers and they all come out lopsided. The five-year cost of any subscription tracker is between 8x and 20x the one-time cost of a local app that does the same job.
Who this is wrong for
If you're a contractor billing hours, the Timex pricing story doesn't help you, because what you actually need is project tagging, invoicing, and exports your accountant trusts. Toggl and Harvest are excellent at this, and their subscriptions are buying real ongoing value (the integration into your accounting workflow). Pay them, not us.
If you're managing a team and need cross-account dashboards, you also need the subscription apps, for the same reason — the ongoing value is in the team layer, not the tracker on each Mac. Timing and RescueTime sell that layer well.
If you want an algorithm to score your day and tell you whether you were "productive," that's a different product entirely. Rize is the polished version. I don't believe in the premise, but I respect that some people find the score motivating, and they're charging for the inference work that produces it.
What I built is for the person who just wants to look. The strip of the day. The breakdown by app. The window where Slack ate two hours. The block where Claude Code earned its keep. No score. No coach. No subscription. One file you own.
What "buy once" actually feels like
You hand us $49 (or $24.50 right now with TIMEX50 until July 1). We send you a license key. The app activates on up to three Macs. You use it on whatever you want. We never email you to remind you to renew, because there's nothing to renew.
When v2 ships in a year or two, you decide whether the new features are worth a paid upgrade — and the upgrade is half-off for existing v1 owners. If you don't upgrade, v1 keeps working on whatever version of macOS supports it. We don't kneecap the old version to push you forward.
That's the whole pricing story. One number, no asterisks.
Try the 100-hour trial. The break timer and lid-down mode stay free forever even if you never pay. Buy when the strip of the day starts answering a question you actually had.