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Show HN: I quit my job and made an automatic time tracker

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Re: Show HN: I quit my job and made an automatic time tracker

#71

Post by eps »

rocksalad wrote: post #43
eps wrote: post #40

> $179 Ballsy... unless you mean to make that deep discount permanent, which is a can of worms of its own.

Thanks for your feedback! The final price isn’t set in stone yet. My goal is to make Taim accessible and affordable for individuals. The current discount is a special offer for early supporters, and I’m still considering the best pricing structure to ensure everyone gets great value. I appreciate your thoughts and am always open to more feedback!

I'd encourage you to do a thorough competitor reseach, but anything over $100 will be a hard sell. It's not that $179 is unreasonable, it's that people aren't used to shelling out this sort of sum for software in one sitting.

Consider sweetening the deal by offering something like a $20 one-year license with an option of converting it to the perpetual after a year.

Tangentaly related, make sure your permanent licenses do not include permanent support and upgrades. Provide bugfixes for free, but if they buy a perm license, it should be good for whatever version they have now plus X months worth of future versions. After that impose a fee to extend this upgrade access for another X months. This is a 100% fair arrangement as you do need to be compensated for the work that goes into new versions.

Also, with early birds - again, speaking from experience, consider labeling what you have a "beta" and giving it away for free. Then, after few months, do a proper release and offer deeply discounted licenses to all beta users. This kills 3 birds with one stone - builds a loyal userbase, monetizes them and avoids having deep public discounts. Discounts, once you offer them, will be expected and you will lose sales if the only option will be a full-price one. And if you are to have a permanent sale, it will cheapen the perception of the product. So discounts should be used sparringly and in a very controlled manner.

Re: Show HN: I quit my job and made an automatic time tracker

#73

Post by nadermx »

cableshaft wrote: post #69
dvt wrote: post #67

This is a bit of a digression, and I might write a blog post about this, but I welcome comments, either way. It really seems we live in a kind of Twilight Zone when it comes to indie software (both productive, as we see here, but also in entertainment) pricing. AAA software (say, stuff being churned out by companies like MS/Apple/Figma/Adobe/etc.) is so aggressively priced, so egregiously recurrent (I actually am not…

> It's kind of how people brutally skewer the $5 Steam indie game, but if the $80 game made by the AAA billion-dollar studio sucks, folks seem to be much more forgiving. ...yep. It gets really tiring. Expectations for even a $5 Steam indie game are really high. Needs to have achievements, leaderboards, steam cloud saves, works on Steam Deck, have online multiplayer, be localized in 8+ languages, accessibility options…

For multiplayer and leaderboard are those things that already have pre packages you can equivalent of pip install?

Re: Show HN: I quit my job and made an automatic time tracker

#74

Post by vunderba »

dvt wrote: post #67

This is a bit of a digression, and I might write a blog post about this, but I welcome comments, either way. It really seems we live in a kind of Twilight Zone when it comes to indie software (both productive, as we see here, but also in entertainment) pricing. AAA software (say, stuff being churned out by companies like MS/Apple/Figma/Adobe/etc.) is so aggressively priced, so egregiously recurrent (I actually am not…

"But something like $10 a month not only probably makes you more money, it also seems to be way more palatable by the general public."

I might be biased, but I think people are feeling pretty subscription fatigued at this point too, so I'm not confident you can win either way.

Also, I will say that there is at least some reason for AAA games costing a disproportionately larger amount of money considering that they usually have hundreds of people on staff versus an indie dev company which might have a few people and often is just a solopreneur.

The best you can hope for is something that makes a modest amount of money that doesn't require a tremendous amount of personal investment and risk.

Re: Show HN: I quit my job and made an automatic time tracker

#76

Post by [deleted] »

dvt wrote: post #67

This is a bit of a digression, and I might write a blog post about this, but I welcome comments, either way. It really seems we live in a kind of Twilight Zone when it comes to indie software (both productive, as we see here, but also in entertainment) pricing. AAA software (say, stuff being churned out by companies like MS/Apple/Figma/Adobe/etc.) is so aggressively priced, so egregiously recurrent (I actually am not…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I quit my job and made an automatic time tracker

#77

Post by brailsafe »

dvt wrote: post #67

This is a bit of a digression, and I might write a blog post about this, but I welcome comments, either way. It really seems we live in a kind of Twilight Zone when it comes to indie software (both productive, as we see here, but also in entertainment) pricing. AAA software (say, stuff being churned out by companies like MS/Apple/Figma/Adobe/etc.) is so aggressively priced, so egregiously recurrent (I actually am not…

> To me, even 100 bucks as a one-time-payment for productivity software (that is: something that literally helps you make more money) is kind of a no-brainer

It's only a no-brainer if you've had the credit card at the ready because whichever problem you have is costing you enough in time and you have confidence that this purchase will be the one to finally make you more money. A new $5500 MacBook would improve my workflow a bit, but by what point would I break even on the purchase? A new iPad Pro might hypothetically let me draw a chart or two sometime in the next 10 years, but its value is where its value is for different people.

But I also don't pre-order games and don't typically buy games over around $50, even then it's rare, but I know lots of people with thousands in pointless game buys.

Re: Show HN: I quit my job and made an automatic time tracker

#78

Post by niobe »

rocksalad wrote: post #56
jabroni_salad wrote: post #52

Does anybody use these to bill clients? My problem with these dealios is they can usually tell you what applications you have open but not why you had them open. The auto tracker will tell me I spend a lot of time in notepad++ and mobaxterm but wont relate it to the case that prompted me to do that, so starting a free running timer is the only way to get a billable number.

I understand the challenge. Taim addresses this by allowing you to categorize your activities and sessions manually, in addition to automatic tracking. You can relate your time spent in apps like Notepad++ and Mobaxterm to specific projects or clients. This way, you get a clear, billable number that’s tied to the actual work you did. Thanks for your feedback, and I hope Taim can solve this problem for you.

Well this is an indication of the fundamental issue with tools of this sort that attempt to automate data collection .. if it's not 99% automatic and 99% correct then you're not actually saving me any time vs. manual time tracking. You're actually making things harder by adding another layer to the software stack that must be reviewed for correctness and painstakingly fixed because it doesn't get things right.

Until tools know what I'm doing and what I'm thinking I prefer a one-touch manual approach that I know is right because I entered it. This allows me to adjust for that other project's phonecall while I may have been moving my mouse in a spreadsheet. Or the time watering the plants while I was solving an architectural problem. Or the fact I didn't record 5 minutes yesterday so am rounding up 5 minutes today. Etc..

Re: Show HN: I quit my job and made an automatic time tracker

#79

Post by blazerunner »

rocksalad wrote: post #58
rylan-talerico wrote: post #57

Your website looks awesome. Congratulations on the launch!

Thank you so much for your kind words and support!

+1 the UI for the site and app looks top notch. I'm not the target customer so can't really comment from a value perspective, but would use it if I had this kind of need.

A couple of very tiny details on the marketing site:

- The animation below 'struggling with tracking your work hours?' kicks in a bit too late for me, maybe a quirk of browsing fullscreen QHD, but I felt like I was in a kind of no man's land [seeing this](https://imgur.com/a/1mB8d5j). I would start this when the title is at about 50% of the viewport height.

- Logo in the header pixelates a little bit and looks weird, I believe this is a Chrome rendering issue, not sure what the fix might be.

Re: Show HN: I quit my job and made an automatic time tracker

#80

Post by diffxx »

brailsafe wrote: post #60

Looks like you might have been inspired by Klokki, which is what I've been using for a while. Seems like a decent UI direction, but quite a lot of UI for something designed for people who forget to use their time tracking app. The roadmap indicates you've got plans for a bunch of features that are hard to reconcile with the idea of something getting out of my way. I do feel like that pricing scheme is also too aggres…

My gut reaction is that independent of the quality of this product, $30 is easily spent on lunch for 1 in many places. I would like to see more developers willing to pay for tools that they benefit from using. Since we generally don't culturally, it is very difficult to make it as an independent developer which has many unfortunate consequences.
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