"Owntime: Questions Buyers Ask"

These are the questions people actually ask before buying, answered directly. If your question is not here, email me at the address on the contact page and I will answer it.

#Pricing

How much does owntime cost? $99 during the early bird for the first fifty licenses, then $149. One time, per license, covering up to three people, one Mac each. There is no subscription and no renewal.

Is there a free trial? Fourteen days, full app, no email required. Your trial clock starts when you first open the app, not when you download it.

What happens when the early bird ends? The $99 price goes away and the $149 price becomes the only price. Existing buyers are not affected. The fifty-license cap is real, and the counter on the pricing page is updated by hand.

Do I pay again for updates? No. Updates through v1.x are included. A future v2 might be a paid upgrade, and that boundary has been communicated since launch.

What about refunds? Thirty days, any reason, just reply to the receipt. No process, no form, no negotiation.

#Data

Where is my data stored? In one local SQLite file at ~/Documents/owntime/timesheet.db. It is on your Mac, in your Documents folder. You can see it, copy it, and open it with any SQLite tool.

Can I read my data without owntime? Yes. The file is standard SQLite. Open it in a SQLite browser, query it with a script, or export it to CSV. You do not need the app to read your own history.

What happens to my data if owntime disappears? Nothing. The file is on your disk. You can keep opening it, migrating it, and billing from it. The app is a reader for the file, and the file outlives the app.

Do you see my timesheet? No. There is no server, no telemetry, and no account. The only way I would see your data is if you send it to me.

How do I back up? The file is in your Documents folder, so it is backed up by whatever backs up your Mac. owntime also keeps about twenty automatic local backups and can mirror the file to your own Cloudflare R2 or S3 bucket on every save.

#Teams

How does it work for a team? Each person installs owntime on their own Mac and tracks in their own file. A six-person studio buys two licenses. There is no shared live dashboard and no admin console.

Can we see everyone's hours in one place? Not live. Each person's file is separate. You can roll up exported reports into a combined view, but the product does not merge them for you.

Is there a phone app? Not yet. owntime is a Mac desktop app. Windows and Linux may follow demand, but there is no timeline I am committing to publicly.

Do you have resource forecasting? No. No scheduling, no resource forecasting, no Harvest Forecast-style view. That is on the anti-roadmap, and the reason is architectural: forecasting requires a server, and a server requires a subscription.

#Migration

Can I import from Harvest, Toggl, Clockify, and FreshBooks? Yes. All four are supported, with a dry-run preview before anything writes.

Will I lose my history? The fields those CSVs carry, dates, clients, projects, tasks, rates, notes, billable flags, come through. Tool-specific things the CSV does not carry do not. The preview shows you exactly where the boundaries are before you commit.

What if the import looks wrong? Cancel. Nothing has been written. Fix the file and try again.

Do you help with the migration? For the first ten switchers, yes. Send your export and rate card and I will hand-migrate it. After that, the self-serve import is the path, and it takes about ten minutes.

#The honest limits

What is owntime not good at? Live multi-person dashboards, phone tracking, resource forecasting, and complex proposal workflows. If your studio runs on those, owntime is the wrong tool, and I will tell you so.

What if you stop developing it? You keep a working app and a file you hold. The worst case is the tool stops improving. It does not stop working.

Is it really buy-once, or is there a catch? It is really buy-once. The catch is the one I have stated plainly: you are trading the risk of repricing for the risk of abandonment. Both are real. One is happening across the industry every month. The other has not happened yet.

See the full pricing · Try owntime free for 14 days · Read the honest roadmap