An app that turns any price into hours of your life ⏳
Hey IHers 👋
I just launched Price of Time — an Android app built around one stubborn idea:
Money is an abstraction. Time isn't.
When you see a $1,200 gadget, your brain shrugs. But when the app tells you "that's 47 hours of your life", something clicks — and you negotiate with yourself very differently.
How it works:
- Scan or type a price → it instantly shows the cost in work hours / days of your life, based on your real income
- Decide on the spot: Buy, Save, or Postpone
- Every purchase you skip feeds your savings stats and your goals (e.g. "save $2,000 toward a car")
- Achievements + monthly streaks to keep the habit alive
Under the hood (for the builders here):
- Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, MVVM, Room + Firebase, offline-first sync
- One single source of truth for all money↔time math (learned that the hard way after 4 diverging copies 😅)
- 25 languages, multi-currency
- Free vs Premium (extended history, unlimited goals, no ads, Excel export)
It's live on Google Play now — would love some real downloads and brutal feedback:
👉 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.priceoftime
Two things I'd genuinely love your take on:
- Does the "price → hours of life" framing actually change how you'd spend?
- What would make you keep it past week one?
Happy to share the tech behind anything. Thanks for reading 🙏
Trending on Indie Hackers
One thing I'd be careful with:
A different framing can sometimes change a decision while leaving the underlying preference exactly where it was.
Those can look surprisingly similar from the outside.
That's the part I'd be most curious about here.
Sharp point — and the thing I'm least sure of myself.
A one-time reframe can change a single decision without touching the underlying preference. My bet is that repetition bridges the gap: seeing "47 hours" once is just a nudge, but seeing it on every purchase — plus watching the skipped ones pile up into real savings — is closer to retraining the default reaction.
Still unproven though. The honest test is week-4 behavior, not week-1. If someone uses it long enough to tell me the framing stopped working (or quietly changed how they shop), that's exactly the data I want.
The week-4 point is interesting.
What I'd be most curious about is whether the eventual behavior tells you what you think it's telling you.
That's one of those situations where the same outcome can sometimes support very different conclusions.
I've got a few thoughts on that, but it's probably more than I'd try to unpack properly in a thread.
What's the best email to reach you on?