Temporal.ist is automatic time tracking for people who bill by the hour and can't stand filling timesheets. There's no timer to start or stop — you just work. A lightweight desktop client (Windows, macOS, Linux, AppImage) watches your project files, and extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari track the URLs you point them at. A session opens on a file save or a page visit and closes itself once you go idle — 15 minutes by default, and you can change it. It all lands in a web dashboard with projects, clients, sessions and a calendar view.

Here's the part that makes it different from most "automatic" trackers. The others are activity monitors: they watch which app or window has focus and hand you a vague log like "Editor 3h, Browser 1h, Slack 30m" that you still have to sort into clients by hand. Temporal.ist doesn't guess from which app is open — you define per-project patterns once (file globs like ~/work/dmi/**, *.ts, !node_modules, and URL patterns like app.dundermifflin.com/*), and when a file you changed or a page you visited matches, that time is tagged to the right project and client the instant it's recorded. No after-the-fact "assign this block to a project" cleanup, because attribution already happened at capture time.

That pattern approach also tightens the privacy story. It only ever looks at the file paths and URLs you explicitly chose to track — not everything you do on your machine. It logs only timestamps and which file or URL touched them — never the contents of your files, never your keystrokes. No screenshots, no productivity scores, no mouse-jiggle surveillance. Sessions stay editable rather than black-box read-only, so you decide what actually gets billed. Add EU data residency, one-click export (JSON/CSV), full account deletion, and a flat promise not to sell your data or bolt ad-tech onto the app, and you get a humane alternative to monitoring tools like Hubstaff and Time Doctor.

When it's time to get paid, billable sessions become invoices in a click — auto-numbered (ORG-YYYYMM-XXXX), with draft/sent/paid/overdue statuses, PDF export, per-client rates, currencies and tax. You also get visual analytics (a time-distribution donut, activity bar charts, project breakdowns, daily timesheet heatmaps), CSV/PDF reports, live active sessions over WebSocket, and team/organisation support. And because the desktop client stores everything locally first, it keeps working offline and syncs once you're back online.

Pricing keeps it simple: a Solo tier that's free forever (unlimited folders, no credit card), plus paid Pro and Teams plans.

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