"Why owntime Will Not Build Forecasting (And Who Should Look Elsewhere)"

I get this request every week, usually phrased as a question and sometimes phrased as a dealbreaker.

"Does owntime do resource forecasting?" "Can you add Harvest Forecast?" "I need to see who is free next Tuesday. Is that on the roadmap?"

The answer is no. It is not on the roadmap. It is on the anti-roadmap, which is the list of things I have decided not to build, and I want to explain why, because the reason is the same reason the product exists.

#What forecasting actually requires

Resource forecasting, the way Harvest Forecast does it, needs a live view of every person on the team. Who is booked. Who is free. What projects are coming. It needs all of that in one place, updated in real time, because a forecast that is a day out of date is worse than no forecast.

That live, multi-person, real-time view requires a server

. There is no way around it. You cannot forecast across six people if each person's data is in a separate file on a separate Mac. You need a central place where all the data lives and a way to query it live, and that is a server.

I am not building a server. That is the whole product. So I am not building forecasting.

#The honest reason underneath the technical one

The technical reason is real, but it is not the whole reason. The whole reason is that forecasting is the feature where the subscription logic creeps back in.

A forecasting tool is a team tool. A team tool needs a server. A server needs to be paid for. The way you pay for a server at scale is per seat, per month. And once you have per-seat monthly pricing, you have the exact architecture that lets a new owner reprice you, because the thing being priced is access to the server, and the server is the thing holding your data.

I watched Harvest go through this. I do not want to build the first version of the thing I am trying to offer an alternative to. So forecasting stays off the list, not because I cannot imagine it, but because building it would mean becoming the product I left.

#What I built instead

I want to be fair about what owntime does offer, because "no forecasting" sounds like "no insight" and that is not true.

You can see your own hours, per project, per client, in weekly and monthly views. You can see which projects are near their hours budget, with alerts at 75, 90, and 100 percent. You can export any view to CSV or PDF and roll it up yourself. For a solo consultant or a small agency where the owner just needs to know "are we on track this month," that is usually enough.

It is not forecasting. It is not a live team dashboard. It is a clear view of your own work and a warning when a project is running hot. For some studios, that is the right amount of insight. For others, it is not, and I want to help you figure out which one you are before you buy.

#Who should look elsewhere

If your studio runs on resource allocation, if a project manager moves people between projects based on who has capacity, if you need to see next Tuesday's availability across the team, owntime is the wrong tool. Not "not yet." Wrong. You should use Harvest with Forecast, or Toggl with a team plan, or a dedicated resourcing tool.

I am not going to take your money for a product that does not do the thing you need and promise I will add it later. The anti-roadmap exists so that when you ask "will you add forecasting," I can point to a written decision instead of a maybe.

#The request I actually want to hear

The request I want to hear is not "add forecasting." It is "help me see whether my projects are on track without a server." That is the problem I know how to solve, and the solution is already in the app. Budgets, alerts, exports, a weekly grid that shows you where the hours went.

If that is the problem you are trying to solve, owntime is worth a trial. If the problem is "I need to allocate eight people across twelve projects in real time," I will point you to the tools that do that, and I will mean it.

Try owntime free for 14 days · See the honest comparison with Harvest · Read the full anti-roadmap

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