The reason there are so many time tracker apps for Mac is that none of them quite work the way you want.
The good ones become productivity coaches that score your day on a scale you didn't pick. The cheap ones are subscriptions that quietly sync your window titles to a cloud they won't let you turn off. The Toggl-style ones rely on you remembering to start a stopwatch every time you switch tasks — which, if you've ever tried, you know is a fantasy. The free one is Apple's Screen Time, which is read-only, has no per-window detail, no per-tab detail, no export, and no break timer.
I wanted a tracker that did three things and only three things:
- Run automatically. No timer to start. No project to pick.
- Let me look at the data. Drag onto a slice of the timeline. See what was open.
- Get out of the way.
Timex is what came out. It's not the most ambitious time tracker on the App Store — that's a feature, not a bug — and the design choices it makes are easier to explain by stating what it isn't than what it is.
What Timex is not
It's not a manual timer. You don't start it. You don't stop it. You don't pick a project. There's no "what are you working on?" prompt. Open the lid, the tracker is already running. Close the lid, it stops. Toggl, Harvest, Clockify, every browser-extension stopwatch — those are excellent if you bill by the hour and have the discipline to start a timer. I don't have that discipline. I don't know anyone who genuinely does. The dirty secret of the manual-timer tools is that most data in them is reconstructed at the end of the week from memory, which is exactly the data quality you'd expect.
It's not a productivity coach. There are no scores. There's no "focus index". There are no weekly insights. The reason for this is that I don't believe an algorithm in San Francisco knows whether the four hours I just spent on Hacker News were a waste or research. You do.
It's not a team product. It doesn't export to your manager. It doesn't generate billable hours. It doesn't have a leaderboard, a Slack integration, or a "team analytics" dashboard. If you need that, Toggl, Harvest, and Timing all have excellent team plans, and you should buy one of them.
It's not in the cloud. The whole product is a Mac app, a single file in your Library folder, and a menu bar pill. There's no server. There's no API endpoint to leak. There's no account that can be breached. Block its outgoing traffic with Little Snitch and the app doesn't notice. The data stays on the Mac that recorded it.
What Timex is
Three things, captured automatically, second by second:
- The app you have in front
- The window or document you are looking at
- For supported browsers (with your permission), the website tab you have open
When you switch context, Timex closes the previous block of time and starts a new one. The strip of bars in the Today view is just those blocks rendered along a 24-hour line. Drag onto a slice of the strip, the totals below filter to that slice. Tap an app, the app expands to show the windows or websites that ate the time. That's the daily-use loop. There's nothing else to learn.
Plus, since it lives in the menu bar anyway, two more capabilities ride along with the tracker:
- A break timer that pauses when you're idle, so a deep focus block doesn't get unfairly chopped up. Breaks come with short cinematic exercise videos — hydration, mindfulness, neck rolls, the back stretch you actually need.
- A lid-down mode that holds a power assertion so the Mac stays awake while you're running a local LLM, an overnight render, or a long batch.
Three pillars, one menu bar slot, one local file, one pause button. That's the product.
The cost of skipping the cloud
I want to be honest about what you give up.
No multi-Mac sync. If you use a desktop and a laptop, each one has its own data. You can put the file inside an iCloud or Dropbox folder if you want a manual single source of truth, but that's bring-your-own and not officially supported. Proper opt-in sync may land later. As a default, it won't.
No "weekly insights" email. Some people like a Sunday-morning recap of last week. Timex isn't the right product if you need that as a delivery mechanism. (We may build a local recap view in the app. We won't build the version that gets sent from a server we operate.)
No mobile app. The data lives on a Mac. You read it on a Mac. No cloud means no phone counterpart.
No team features. Already covered. If you need to bill clients or share a dashboard with your boss, Timex is the wrong tool. Buy a different one.
What you get in return is a tool that survives the company you bought it from getting acquired and sunsetted, your VPN flaking out, the wifi being down on a flight, and the next data breach making the news. The file doesn't care. It's yours, on your disk, in a format that's been stable for 25 years and will be readable on whatever computer you own in 2050.
On charging for it
This is the part I went back and forth on for a long time. The local-first ethos suggests "free and open source, take it or leave it". The reality of building a Mac app — code signing, notarization, support email, the slow grind of macOS API churn — is that it doesn't maintain itself.
I settled on $49 one-time, three Macs, no subscription. The trial is the part I'm most proud of: 100 hours of recorded activity for free — about 12 work-days, plenty to evaluate — plus the break timer and the lid-down mode stay free forever even if you never pay. The bet is that 100 hours is enough to know whether you want the unlimited tracker. The price is half a month of Timing's top tier. After that, no further bills. Major version upgrades will probably be paid because that's the only sustainable model, but you can keep using v1 forever.
I'm also closed-source for v1. I want to ship a small, focused, polished tool, not run a community. That may change. For now: closed binary, generous trial, one-time price.
What this is for
The honest user persona is "person who wants to know where the day went, and would rather see the answer for themselves than have an algorithm interpret it".
If you're a contractor billing hours, this is the wrong tool — you need invoicing, projects, and exports, and you should buy Toggl or Harvest.
If you're a manager doing team analytics, this is the wrong tool — you need cross-account sync and dashboards, and you should buy Timing or RescueTime.
If you've ever sat down at 6 pm and asked "wait, what did I actually do today?" and not had a satisfying answer — that's who I built this for. Drag onto a slice of the strip. Tap an app. The answer is right there. Then close the window and get back to work.
Try the trial. Buy when you're sure. The data stays on your machine either way.