Hourly - Time & Income Tracker

Last year my company went through a reorg. Things got boring. I started freelancing on the side to stay sane, and pretty quickly I needed to track hours for clients.

I looked at what was out there. Everything wanted to be a project management suite. Pomodoro timers, Gantt charts, team dashboards. I just needed to tap start, tap stop, and export something at the end of the month. None of these apps would let me just do that.

I'm a backend developer, never shipped an iOS app. So I built a throwaway nap tracker first (NapSense) to learn how provisioning profiles work, how to structure SwiftUI, how the App Store review process goes. Glad I did that on something I didn't care about, because there were a lot of stupid gotchas.

After that, Hourly took about a month. It tracks time, shows what you've earned based on your hourly rate, and exports PDF reports. I didn't plan much beyond that.

Then I went full-time freelance. Hourly stopped being a side project and became the app I actually use to bill clients. I haven't done any marketing. It just sits on the App Store and gets 10-15 new users a day. Most are in Taiwan, but lately I'm seeing people in Hong Kong and Japan.

3 paying subscribers so far. I know that's tiny. But I built this in a month with no budget, so honestly I'm just happy it works.

One thing that surprised me — I emailed one of my paid users. He's in finance consulting, charges by the hour, but his clients always push back on the price. He uses Hourly to keep a detailed log so he can show them "here's what I did, here's how long it took." I never thought about the app that way when I was building it.

If you're a backend dev wanting to ship an app: build a practice project first on something you don't care about. The iOS ecosystem has a million small problems that have nothing to do with your actual product idea. Better to hit those walls early on throwaway code. And don't add features just because you can. The reason people pick Hourly over bigger apps is because it does less.

Hourly is free on the App Store for iPhone and Mac. Ask me anything.