About Tracker

Who builds it

I am Felipe Fidalgo, and I build Tracker on my own from La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Design, code, the website you are reading, and the answers to every question that comes in: all of it is me. There is no team behind this and no company standing in front of it, which is worth saying plainly, because it is what you are trusting when you install a tool that watches your screen.

You can check that I exist: GitHub and LinkedIn.

Why Tracker exists

I got tired of traditional time trackers. Every one of them asks you to press start, remember to press stop, and fill in a timesheet later. I would forget the first, forget the second, and end up on Friday reconstructing a week from calendar entries and browser history — which is guessing with extra steps.

What I wanted was something I could leave running in the background that just took care of it. Not a stopwatch I have to operate, but a tool that watches which window I actually have in front of me, files that time under the right client, and has the answer ready when I need to invoice.

Nothing I found did that without also asking me to upload my work to somebody else's server, so I built it. That is Tracker.

How it works, and what it will not do

Three decisions hold the whole thing together, and I do not plan to trade them away:

• It stays on your Mac. Window titles, URLs and time entries go into a SQLite file on your own disk. There is no account, no sync and no server of mine to send anything to. Theprivacy policy names every service involved.
• It runs without you. No timers to start, no timesheet to fill in. You set up your clients once, and the tracking happens while you work.
• It is built for freelancers. The unit of work is a client and the output is an invoice-ready report. It is not an employee monitoring tool, and I am not going to turn it into one.

Writing

I write about automatic time tracking, billable hours and why a tool like this should keep your data local on the Tracker blog. Every article there is written by me.