TimoDesk

TimoDesk is a full workforce management platform: automatic time tracking, activity monitoring, screenshot capture, project management, and productivity analytics — unified in one workspace for remote teams, in-house teams, project-based teams, and freelancers.

I designed and shipped the entire product: the background desktop tracking app, the real-time sync layer, the analytics backend, and the reporting dashboards.

Distributed teams have a visibility problem. Managers can't see where hours actually go, timesheets filled in by hand are unreliable, and most tracking tools on the market are either too expensive per seat or too heavy on the machines they run on.

Existing tools also punish honest workers: manual timers get forgotten, offline work gets lost, and reports arrive too late to act on. The goal was crystal-clear visibility with real-time activity reports and focus metrics — without making the tool itself a burden.

A lightweight desktop app that runs in the background and tracks active time and app usage automatically — no manual input, no forgotten timers. Work is grouped into projects and tasks, and every tracked second flows into visual productivity reports managers can actually use for decisions.

Screenshot monitoring stores visual progress securely for later reference, and offline tracking with automatic sync means a dropped connection never loses a minute of work. Pricing is deliberately radical: one flat $1 per user per month with every feature included — no tiers, no feature gates.

The desktop tracker is an Electron.js app, but the interesting work happens below JavaScript: native C++ addons built with N-API use the Win32 API to detect the active window, foreground process, and browser URL with minimal overhead — the same systems work published in my open-source win-track project.

A WebSocket service streams activity events from desktop clients to the backend in real time, feeding live dashboards. The reporting backend aggregates millions of tracked events into daily, weekly, and per-project analytics. Keeping the tracker lightweight — low CPU, low memory, invisible in daily use — was a hard requirement from day one.

TimoDesk is live in production with paying teams — startups, agencies, outsourcing businesses, and freelancers — tracking real work every day. The flat-rate pricing makes it one of the most affordable full-featured trackers on the market, and the native tracking core keeps it fast enough that people forget it's running.