Nobody who works for themselves actually hates tracking time. What they hate is working for free. An hour that never makes it onto an invoice isn’t absorbed by a corporate budget somewhere — it comes straight out of one person’s pocket, and it goes missing most reliably on the days that were too busy to stop and write anything down. The tools meant to fix that tend to make it worse: timers built for a manager watching forty people, dashboards nobody working alone needs, and a monthly subscription charged for the privilege of billing somebody else.
Enter Time Heist, from Chicago creative studio HoneyWired®. Instead of counting minutes, it counts money. A live earnings counter sits in the Mac menu bar and climbs, second by second, while you work — watching an afternoon turn from $40 into $440 is a far better reason to press start than professional guilt ever was. Rates are set per client, overridden per project, or dialed in on a single task. Billable and unbillable work are tracked side by side, so the hours given away sit right next to the ones that paid. Walk away, and idle detection asks what to do with the gap instead of quietly padding the invoice. An Unbilled view lists every hour tracked and not yet charged, oldest first — typically the most expensive list in the app.
“Every freelancer has an hour they worked, forgot, and swallowed the cost of. We wanted software that acts like an ally instead of an audit: you watch the cash tick up in real time, you own your data entirely, and you buy the tool once — the way software used to work.” — Kevin McGlone, Creative Director, HoneyWired
The privacy is structural rather than promised. There is no account and no server because there is nowhere to sign in: hours, clients, rates, and invoices live in a database on your own Mac, with zero telemetry, zero analytics, and no third-party libraries in the build. Google Sheets sync is optional, runs directly from your Mac to your Drive, and asks for the narrowest permission Google offers — the specific files Time Heist creates, and nothing else. No screenshots, no keystroke tracking, no snooping on what else is open.
It is also blunt about its own limits rather than burying them: in thirteen countries that clear invoices through a government system — Italy and Poland among them — a Time Heist PDF isn’t the legal invoice, and the app says so when you set your region, long before you pay for invoicing. The full list, and the EN 16931 file it writes for Europe’s structured-invoice networks, are covered at honeywired.com/apps/timeheist.
Time Heist is a free download on the Mac App Store, and tracking stays free: unlimited clients, projects, and tasks, live menu-bar earnings, reports, idle detection, manual backups, and CSV export, with no account and no ads. Invoicing, Google Sheets sync, and Excel export unlock with a single $29.99 one-time purchase after a full 30-day trial — no subscriptions, ever. Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Available in English, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
Download Time Heist on the Mac App Store →
Watch it tick up at honeywired.com/apps/timeheist.
