Chronoid — Automatic Time Tracker for macOS

https://chronoid.app/

Why This Matters

The two failure modes of every time tracker: manual ones (Toggl, Harvest) demand you remember to start and stop a timer — you don't, so the data is fiction. Automatic ones (RescueTime, Timing) capture everything but ship it to a cloud you don't control — which is fine for personal analytics, less fine for client work that's under NDA.
Chronoid is the latter shape (automatic, no-timer-needed) with the privacy posture of the former. 100% local storage by default, optional cloud sync only if you opt in. One-time purchase from $49, no subscription. Version 1.0.84 just hit Homebrew cask. macOS 14+.

What It Actually Does

  • Background activity capture. Monitors active app, document title, and URL across hundreds of apps — VS Code, Figma, Chrome, Slack, Terminal, etc.
  • Project attribution. Maps activity → client/project based on rules (this Figma file = Client A, anything in /Users/me/code/lossless-monorepo = our work).
  • Idle detection. Knows when you stepped away, so the timesheet stops counting.
  • AI Chat over your time data. Natural-language queries — "how many hours on Client B this month", "what did I spend Tuesday afternoon on?" — answered locally over your own data.
  • Visual analytics. Breakdowns by client, project, app, time-of-day.
  • Focus tooling. Built-in Pomodoro + website blocker, for the times you want to constrain rather than just measure.
  • Apple-Silicon-native. Lightweight footprint, idle-aware so it's not running hot when you're not.

Where It Fits in Our Workflow

Directly relevant to the small-team consulting + portfolio-company-advisory motion. Across the Lossless tree, work spans many client repos, many GitHub orgs, many "is this billable, and to whom" judgment calls. A passive recorder that lets you reconstruct what you actually did on a given day — without performing the timesheet ritual — is the right shape.
The AI-chat-over-local-data angle is genuinely interesting. Most "AI time tracking" tools ship your activity to a hosted LLM. Chronoid's pitch is the opposite — your activity stays local and the model queries it locally. Worth a sanity check on actually verifying that claim (Little Snitch + ProcMon during a session), but if it holds, this is the privacy posture our crawl fetch ingest and ~/.secrets discipline expect from a tool touching this much workflow context.
Compare against Timing (subscription, cloud) and RescueTime (cloud-first). Chronoid's local-by-default + one-time-purchase positioning is the differentiator.

Install

bash 
brew install --cask chronoid
Free trial in-app, then $49+ one-time per license.
Source: https://chronoid.app/