Search for "Rize app" and two of the top five results belong to a credit union. This review is about the other Rize: Rize (rize.io), the automatic time tracker for Mac and Windows.
One disclosure up front: I make Timex, a Mac time tracker that competes with Rize. Every Rize fact below comes from Rize's published pages and public user reviews, checked in October 2026 and linked, so you can verify me instead of trusting me.
Short answer: Rize is a cloud-backed automatic time tracker for macOS and Windows that uses AI to turn your active-window history into tagged time entries for clients and projects. Individual plans cost $9.99–$39.99 a month billed annually, or $12.99–$49.99 month to month, after a 7-day trial, and there's no free tier (checked October 2026). It's a strong pick for freelancers and agencies who bill clients and want AI to do the filing. It's the wrong pick if your activity history has to stay on your own machine.
The Rize app in 2026 is not the one in older reviews
Rize started as a personal focus coach. Over 2025 and 2026 it turned into an AI timesheet and profitability platform for people and teams who bill by the hour. Rize's own changelog (2026) lays out the path:
- July 2023: the Session Timer — focus, break and meeting sessions, music, and a Focus Quality Score.
- May 2025: Rize Teams, with shared clients, projects and billing rates.
- October–November 2025: AI-written time entries, then GPT-5-powered auto-tagging.
- August 2026: the Rize Agent (chat, scheduled routines, AI reports), then profitability, resourcing and invoicing.
- September 4, 2026: Rize began retiring categories in favor of labels on entries and per-app rules, as a gradual rollout.
That timeline is the key to reading anything else written about the Rize time tracker. The Reddit thread (2023) in the same search results is from December 2023 and describes the old split of focus, meetings and breaks. The YouTube review (2024) beside it is from August 2024. Meanwhile the Rize homepage (2026) now leads with team visibility, billable hours and profitability by client.
One fact helps read that thread: Rize gives a free month per referral, and for those with "considerable audiences" it runs a partner program paying 40% of recurring subscriptions (pricing FAQ). The top Reddit thread is mostly referral codes.
Rize fact sheet (checked October 2026)
- Maker: Rize Labs, Inc. (security page), founded by Will Goto and Macgill Davis (pricing FAQ, 2026).
- Platforms: macOS 10.14.6 or later and Windows 10 or later, with Linux listed as coming (pricing FAQ, 2026). The homepage calls Rize "desktop-focused by design" (Rize homepage); the pricing table puts a mobile app only in the custom Enterprise plan. Data syncs if you run it on several computers (Rize docs FAQ).
- Trial and plans: a 7-day trial with every feature, no card, and no permanent free tier. Basic, Pro and Max come with 500, 1,000 and 3,000 AI credits a month; Pro adds client reports, the MCP server, an API, webhooks and Zapier. Team is $29.99 per seat a month billed annually or $39.99 monthly (Rize plans, 2026), with a two-seat minimum (Davis, 2026).
- What it records by default: the active app's name, the window title, the URL, and timestamps. No keystrokes, no screen recording, no stored screenshots (Rize docs: what Rize tracks).
- Websites on a Mac: reading URLs needs the macOS Automation permission. Rize can't tell when Safari is in a private window and suggests pausing or using another browser for private browsing (Rize docs: tracking websites). That's an Apple limitation, not sloppiness: Timex can't tell a Safari private window apart either, so it records it like any other window.
- Idle: five minutes without keyboard or mouse input marks you idle; an hour ends the session (Rize privacy page).
- Focus and breaks: a focus session starts when about 75% of a 15-minute stretch is in focus apps (Rize docs: focus time). Automatic break detection logs breaks on your timeline, and breaks you start yourself open full screen by default (Rize docs: breaks). There's also a distraction blocker, a Focus Quality Score built from more than 20 attributes, and a focus music library (Rize productivity features).
- Compliance: GDPR and CCPA; SOC 2 Type II is in progress and expected late 2026 (Rize privacy page).
What Rize costs over three years
As of October 2026, one person pays $359.64 to $1,799.64 over three years, depending on plan and billing cycle. The per-month prices are from Rize's pricing page (2026); the totals are my arithmetic, before tax:
| Plan (AI credits/mo) | Annual billing | Quarterly | Monthly | 3 years, cheapest cycle |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic (500) | $9.99/mo | $11.49/mo | $12.99/mo | $9.99 × 36 = $359.64 |
| Pro (1,000) | $23.99/mo | $26.99/mo | $28.99/mo | $23.99 × 36 = $863.64 |
| Max (3,000) | $39.99/mo | $43.99/mo | $49.99/mo | $39.99 × 36 = $1,439.64 |
Paying month to month for three years costs $467.64 on Basic, $1,043.64 on Pro and $1,799.64 on Max. A two-person team on the cheapest Team cycle is $29.99 × 2 × 36 = $2,159.28.
Before you pick annual, note the terms: fees already paid aren't prorated or refunded when you cancel, and each renewal is charged at the price in effect on the renewal date, with notice of any change (Rize terms).
Two things on the pricing page don't line up, so ask before you buy. The FAQ still says individual plans top out at $39.99 a month, while the plan table lists Max at $49.99 monthly. And the note under the plans says they "differ by AI credit allotment only," while the Pro card lists features Basic doesn't have. I also couldn't find on the pricing page, the docs FAQ or the AI docs what one AI credit buys or what happens when you run out.
To be fair, Rize runs servers and pays LLM providers for every entry it writes, so part of that subscription is real ongoing cost. My general case against subscriptions for software that runs entirely on your laptop is in Rize pricing and the five-year subscription math; it predates Rize's current plans, so use the numbers above.
What Rize AI does
Rize AI groups your window activity into work blocks, has a language model write a short description and suggest client, project and task tags, and leaves each entry pending until you approve it. The Rize AI docs (2026) list what it matches on: your own keyword rules, embeddings of app names, titles and URLs, calendar events, and tasks synced from ClickUp, Linear or Asana. Each suggestion carries a confidence score, and an Auto-Approve setting skips the review step for people who want it hands-off.
On top of the timesheet sits the Agent: chat with your data, scheduled routines and AI reports (Rize changelog). There's also an MCP server and, since September 3, 2026, an app in ChatGPT (Rize changelog).
The useful part is real. The description line on a timesheet is the step people skip, and Rize automates exactly that step. The price is the review loop: Rize's FAQ tells teams to treat "week one as a training period" (Rize docs FAQ), and the suggestions depend heavily on your setup and improve as you correct them (Rize AI docs).
Where your Rize data goes
Your activity goes to Rize's cloud, and from there to an LLM provider that writes the descriptions. Rize is clear and consistent that it doesn't log keystrokes or store screenshots. It's less consistent about where the servers are and whether anything stays local.
What leaves your computer by default. App names, window titles, URLs and timestamps. The desktop app keeps capturing while you're offline and uploads once you reconnect (Rize buyer's guide, 2026).
Who processes it. Rize's privacy page (2026) names Gemini, Anthropic and OpenAI as the LLM providers that draft entry descriptions, for inference only and not to train those providers' models, and says those LLM APIs are the only outside systems that touch your activity data. Rize's terms say it doesn't train models on your data either, though it may use aggregated, de-identified data to improve its own. The privacy policy, effective April 17, 2026, also names its usage-analytics, performance-monitoring and crash-reporting vendors: Amplitude, New Relic and Rollbar.
Opt-in extras. Screen Text reads the text inside windows to write better descriptions. It needs three separate yeses — from Rize for your organization, from your admin for you personally, and from you — and Rize deletes what it captures after 30 days. In Cloud mode the window image goes to Google Vertex AI and isn't kept. In Local and Hybrid modes the image never leaves your computer, and Screen Text never captures password managers, banking, health, messaging or sign-in pages (Rize privacy page).
Where the servers are depends on which page you read. The security page, updated August 20, 2026, says Google Cloud in US regions. The pricing FAQ says Amazon Web Services. The freelancer page goes further and says "Your data stays on your machine by default." Rize's own co-founder and CEO contradicts that line, calling Rize "cloud-backed" and "a different trust model from data that never leaves the laptop" (Davis, 2026). I'd go with the CEO and the privacy page.
What happens when you stop paying. The pricing FAQ says you keep access and can export past data. The privacy policy says activity data is deleted once the account is closed, and the terms make backups your job. Export before you cancel.
The privacy controls are good, and worth turning on: strip window titles, record domains instead of full URLs, mark apps "Do Not Track," and schedule automatic deletion of raw activity older than a week, two weeks or a month (Rize privacy page).
Rize reviews: what users praise and complain about
Users praise capture that takes no effort, the focus tools and the design. The critical reviews I found mention categorization upkeep, desktop performance, the 2026 redesign and privacy. Each theme rests on a single source, so read them as individual reports, not a measured pattern.
On AppSumo, where the Rize deal has since sold out, it holds 4.8 from 66 ratings, 62 of them five stars (AppSumo reviews). One December 2024 reviewer wrote, "I love getting daily digests, productivity warnings, it has a sleek UI and runs effortless in the background." A 2024 reply in the 2023 Reddit thread confirms there's no mobile tracking (r/ProductivityApps, 2024).
The critical reviews are specific:
- Categorization upkeep. An April 2022 buyer wrote, "I find myself spending more than having to tweak the category type to get an accurate view" (AppSumo, 2022). The co-founder answered in 2024 with a public feature-request board.
- Performance. In November 2025 a paying user reported slow clicks, "crash loops" and no way to change time zone (r/ProductivityApps, 2025). A September 9, 2026 update added time-zone settings per member (Rize changelog).
- The 2026 redesign. In June 2026 a two-year user wrote that after the latest updates "I can't get it to add time entries automatically anymore" (r/rizeai, 2026). Auto-Approve, mentioned above, is Rize's documented route to hands-off entries; whether it fixes that user's case, I can't say.
- Privacy. A 2024 thread opens with a user who liked the trial but was "insanely worried about the privacy concerns" (r/ProductivityApps, 2024). Someone pointed them to ActivityWatch. Months later they reported back that they "found it quite difficult to set up," while Rize had been "extremely easy to get started."
That last exchange is the whole category in miniature: the convenient tool keeps your data, and the private tool asks for your time.
Rize vs a local tracker vs a free one
The honest comparison is three-way: cloud AI, local one-time, and free open source. I make Timex, so read its column with that in mind.
| Rize | Timex | ActivityWatch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where activity data lives | Rize's cloud; metadata sent to LLM providers for descriptions | One SQLite file on your Mac; activity never sent over the network | A SQLite database on your device; never sent to a server |
| Platforms | macOS 10.14.6+, Windows 10+; mobile only on Enterprise | macOS 15 or later on Apple Silicon | Windows, macOS, Linux, Android |
| Price over 3 years, one person | $359.64 (Basic, annual) to $1,799.64 (Max, monthly) | $49 once, up to 3 Macs | $0 (optional supporter plans) |
| Automatic categorization | AI tags entries to clients, projects and tasks; you approve | Rules you write: app, website domain, window-title or URL keyword; starter categories | Regex rules you write, matched on app name and window title |
| Focus and break features | Focus sessions and score, distraction blocker, break detection, focus music | Break timer (5 min every 30 by default, or Pomodoro), Focus Score from weights you set, Energy nudges | None in its feature list |
| Teams and billing | Team dashboards, invoicing, profitability | None; CSV export | None |
| Trial | 7 days, no card | 100 tracked hours, no time limit | Free |
The ActivityWatch column comes from its homepage, FAQ and categorization docs. One catch for Mac buyers: the stable ActivityWatch download is an Intel build, and the Apple Silicon build is a pre-release (ActivityWatch downloads).
The trade in one sentence: Rize does the sorting for you and holds the data; the other two keep the data on your machine and leave the sorting to you. For more local options, I've compared local-first RescueTime alternatives. If you'd rather start and stop timers, see Clockify alternatives. To put cloud trackers side by side over five years, try the time tracker cost calculator.
Who should pick Rize — and who shouldn't
Pick Rize if you bill clients by the hour, your team runs a mix of Macs and Windows PCs, and you want entries written and tagged for you, with invoicing and per-client margin in the same tool. Rize's CEO pitches it on exactly those three things: AI filing, Windows support and team profitability (Davis, 2026). It's also a good fit if you like being coached: focus music, a distraction blocker and full-screen breaks come in the box.
Skip Rize if your activity history can't sit on someone else's servers — client NDAs, regulated work, or plain preference. Skip it if you want to pay once, if you need Linux, or if you only want to see where your day went without a timesheet workflow on top.
That's where a local tracker fits. Timex records the same kind of signal — frontmost app, window title, the active tab's URL — once a second into a file on your Mac, with no account and no activity leaving the machine. You write rules instead of approving AI suggestions, and there's no Windows version, no phone app and no team dashboard. That's the trade.
The honest caveats
This isn't a hands-on test. Everything above comes from Rize's published pages and public user reviews.
I compete with Rize. Every fact is linked so you don't have to take my framing.
Rize changes fast. Prices were checked in October 2026, the switch from categories to labels is rolling out gradually, and your workspace may still show the older settings.
If you're choosing between the cloud and a file on your own disk, run both for a week. Rize's trial is 7 days. Download Timex — its trial is 100 hours of tracked activity with no clock on it, and the break timer stays free either way.
— DK