Receipt · 001Aug 2026
+1500%
Harvest, after Bending Spoons bought it. Teams paying about $130 a month woke up to a very different number. Overnight.
Hacker News, Aug 2026. 111 points, 110 comments. People were not happy.No. 0003 · local-first · buy once
Your time tracker can’t raise your price 15× if you own it.
owntime is buy-once time tracking and invoicing. Built for the shops that got the Harvest email. And flinched. One payment covers up to three people. Your history lives in one file, on your disk. No bill next month. No surprise next year.
▸ Early-bird: first 50 licenses at $99, then $149. One license covers up to three people. 30-day refund. No subscription, ever.
owntime · timesheet.db○ IDLE
00:00:00
Hit start. It ticks for real. Stop it and the entry files itself.
1 license · 3 people · SQLite on your disk · 0 servers · 0 accounts · 0 renewals · ~6 MB · macOS 12+
Pricing, the short version
One license. Three people. That’s the pricing story.
$99
One license, up to three people, one Mac each. That’s $33 a person, once.
$198
Two licenses cover a six-person studio. Zero in year two. Zero in year three.
$864/yr
What the same six-person studio pays per-seat. Every year. And the number can move without their permission.
$33 a person, once. About three months of a per-seat tracker, then free. See the full math.
Why this exists
The deal was simple. We keep your history. You keep paying what we decide.
Receipt · 002Aug 2026
$50 → $15,000
Octopus Deploy. $50 a month to $15,000 a year. One comment says, “so we built a clone instead.” Short. Angry. You get it.
says a Hacker News comment, Aug 2026 — upvoted a lotReceipt · 003Forever
$0/mo
owntime after you buy. Your timesheet is a SQLite file. It sits in ~/Documents/owntime/. Copy it, back it up, open it with anything. We have no way to charge you again, even if we wanted to. That’s the point.
That’s the whole business model. One file you keep.What you own
You need to track time, send a bill, and keep your history. That’s it.
01
Starts in one second
Menu bar timer. Click, work, stop. Or type hours by hand. Projects and clients each have their own rate. Billable or not, you see it at a glance.
02
Quote it, then bill it
Estimates that convert. Send a quote, mark it accepted, and it turns into the invoice without retyping a line. The number you agreed on and the number you bill come from the same document.
03
Retainers that come due, not a bill that runs itself
A retainer is a cadence and a draft. Weekly, monthly, or pinned to month end. One click fills it from that client’s unbilled time and expenses, or from a fixed amount you set. You check the lines and send it yourself. No month bills a client without your click.
04
Invoices that look like you meant them
Pick the unbilled entries. Group by project or day. Add tax. Export a clean PDF with your letterhead, number, and terms. No “export to CSV then fix in Word.”
05
One file. Yours.
timesheet.db lives on your disk. Not ours. Back it up with Dropbox, copy it to a new Mac, open it in any SQLite browser. Works with no wifi. For real, no wifi.
06
Bring your years with you
Harvest and Toggl import. You get a preview before anything writes. If it looks wrong, cancel. Re-importing the same file just makes dupes, so we tell you upfront.
07
Built for the Mac. Properly.
Small app. Fast start. Native menus, tray timer, keyboard everything. One license covers up to three people, one Mac each. Windows/Linux may follow demand — the codebase is ready; we won’t ship them half-tested.
08
Licensed, not rented
No account. No email wall to try it. No ping home. You get a key, you paste it, it checks offline. Keep it forever, even if we disappear. We’d rather you own it than rent it from us.
09
Know when a job is going wrong
Set an hours budget on a project and get warned at 75, 80, 90 and 100% of it, on screen or by email through a mailbox you already own. You find out the job is running hot while there is still time to say something.
Work ticket · MigrationFirst 10 switchers — free
Fleeing Harvest? We’ll move your history by hand.
First 10 switchers get free help. See what’s actually included — it’s a short list on purpose. You send the CSV and your rate card, we send back a ready timesheet.db. Most done same day (weekdays, 24h window).
Pricing
One price. Printed on the box.
owntime · lifetime licensev1.x updates incl.
$99$149one-time · up to 3 people
Early-bird — 47 of 50 left
- Covers up to three people. That’s $33 a person, once.
- Six people? Two licenses, $198, and the row ends.
- Updates through v1.x, free.
- 30-day refund. Any reason. Just reply.
- Your data stays on your machine.
Payments via Lemon Squeezy. Key arrives by email. Activates once, then never checks in again. When 50 are gone, this card says $149 and nothing else changes.
Get owntime
Two downloads. That’s the whole funnel.
DL-1
Try it. 14 days.
The real app. Mac 12 or newer. About 6 MB. Smaller than a lot of icons.
Download trialDL-2
Keep it. $99.
Card, PayPal, tax — Lemon Squeezy handles it. Key lands in your inbox, instant. Paste and you’re done.
Buy licenseUpdates are signed. They install in the app. Your timesheet survives every one.
Questions
Stuff you actually ask.
What if you want to raise prices later?
We can’t, not for you. New big versions might cost, but v1.x keeps working forever — even if you never pay again. Your copy doesn’t call home. We like that constraint. It keeps us honest.
And sync? My other Mac?
No cloud. On purpose. Put the file in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing — it just syncs, because it’s a file. v1.1 adds “back up to your own S3 or R2” if you want. We still run no server.
I have four years in Harvest.
Bring it. CSV import does it in one click, or we’ll do it for the first 10 free. Either way, it all comes. We’ve tested 10k rows; it holds.
Team of 6?
Each person keeps their own file. One license covers up to three people, each on their own Mac. Team roll-ups are coming as an export, not as “add seats, add $$.” Still no server.
Refunds?
30 days. Any reason. Just reply to the receipt. We’d rather you leave and stay friendly than stick around annoyed. That’s kind of the point.