Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed

I built TimeRetain: a time tracker for individuals that runs 100% in your browser. No sign up, no personal data stored, and free while I’m working on the beta.

Click the white demo banner to check it out quickly :)

I’m using it to track my hours at work (e.g., overtime, and what I’ve done so I come prepared for stand up).

In 2023 I launched it here [1], but with a back-end. After I became interested in local-first, I realized JS could handle everything Postgres did - so I ported it.

Time data now never leaves your browser and the app will ping you to run an export from time to time.

I also followed up on some of the feedback in the previous thread (it now has a pause button, a dedicated data export page, no longer relies on a working back-end, and I fixed the spacing in the name).

It’s not a true local first app just yet (e.g., it's not a PWA, and backing up using the File System API is on my list), but I plan on making it one should it gain some traction.

One of the other things I might add is encrypted at rest storage and sync of events, for which the foundation is done (it’s event-based and events are ordered using a HLC timestamp in IndexedDB).

I wonder, though: is multi-device sync even necessary? I would much rather prefer not to store any personal data at all, even if it’s encrypted. Do you need sync? And if so, what would be your ideal solution?

Would love to hear your thoughts in general. Thank you!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34457730

Show HN: TimeRetain – A browser-based personal time tracker, no sign-up needed
timeretain.com

I love this approach of local-first webapp, with optional sync afterwards. I've been working on a journaling/note-taking app with a similar approach, but finishing pet projects on limited free time is hard.

Could you share a bit more about the stack and your experience building it? What was challenging?

But a feature I would love, is a journaling prompt: whenever I stop the timer, I would be prompted to quickly jot down what I've done since I started the timer.

I'm using Angular (yes, really!), and some date-fns utils for the time-related logic. Other than that, it's all custom except for the Catalyst UI library and Frappe charts. The hardest thing to solve was the event-driven foundation (which I'll use for sync support later).

Initially, I started out with Automerge/Yjs but figured that simple event sourcing would be good enough given there's no collaborative/concurrent use case. The benefit of that is that I can actually explain the logic. Not saying those projects lack documentation (they don't), I'm just not comfortable shipping a CRDT that I can't explain e2e. Might change once I have time to dive in properly.