Every hour you bill is evidence you may need a year from now, when a client queries an invoice or an accountant asks what March actually looked like. TimePrivate is a freelance time tracking app for Mac that records that evidence into a database on your own machine, with no account and no server behind it. The free billable hours calculator on this page works right now, in your browser.
The calculator works in any browser today. The app is not released yet: Apple Silicon Macs first, Windows on the roadmap.
A freelance time tracking app has one job a plain work timer does not: it has to turn hours into money you can defend. That means a rate per client or project, a billable flag on every entry, a total you can put on an invoice, and a history that survives long enough to answer a dispute. TimePrivate covers that job in two pieces, and they answer different questions.
Being straight about the state of it: the TimePrivate app is not released, so there is nothing to download or buy today. The calculator below works right now.
Put one client or project per row, the hours you worked on it and the rate you charge. TimePrivate's calculator returns the invoice subtotal, the billable share of your week and your effective hourly rate once the unpaid hours are counted in. The arithmetic runs inside this page, so the client names and rates you type are not submitted anywhere.
| Client or project | Hours | Rate | Billable |
|---|
The effective hourly rate is the subtotal divided by every hour you worked, billable or not. It is the number that tells you whether a $100 an hour project is really a $100 an hour project. Bill 21 hours at $100 and spend another 5 hours on revisions you did not charge for, and TimePrivate's calculator shows $2,100 earned at an effective $80.77 an hour. Taxes, expenses and platform fees are not in here, so treat the subtotal as a subtotal.
Three numbers a row and one number at the bottom. No account, no email, no install, and the same four steps on macOS, Windows or Linux.
One row per client in the TimePrivate calculator, or one row per project if a single client sends you several. The name is only used to label the CSV, so shorthand is fine. Leave rows you do not need empty and they stay out of the totals.
Enter 6.5 for six and a half hours. If your notes are in hours and minutes, divide the minutes by 60 first: 45 minutes is 0.75, so 3 hours 45 minutes is 3.75. Rounding to the nearest quarter hour is the common freelance habit and the field steps in 0.25.
Rates can differ per row, which is the point: a retainer client at one number and a rush job at another. Working on a fixed fee instead? Put the agreed fee in the rate column and 1 in the hours column, and the row lands on the invoice subtotal as itself.
The box under the table is where the week gets real. Pitching, chasing invoices, a revision you swallowed. Those hours drag the effective rate down, and TimePrivate shows the drag rather than hiding it. Download CSV writes every row and every total to a file in your own downloads folder.
This is the routine a freelance time tracking app is supposed to automate, TimePrivate included. It is worth knowing on paper first, because it tells you what to demand of any app you shortlist.
Hourly, daily, or a fixed fee with a capped number of hours. Write down whether you round to the quarter hour and whether travel and calls are billable. Almost every invoice argument starts with this being unwritten.
Hours reconstructed on the 30th are a guess, and clients can smell a guess. Same day beats accurate to the minute. This is the whole argument for automatic tracking: an app that notices what you worked on does not depend on you remembering.
A timer that only produces one weekly number cannot make an invoice. Every entry needs a client, a project and a billable or not billable flag. That flag is what separates the invoice subtotal from the effective rate you actually earned.
"Homepage revisions round two" ages far better than "design". You are writing the invoice line item now rather than three weeks later, and you are writing the answer to a query that may land next year.
Client portals close. Subscriptions lapse. Export to CSV on a schedule and keep it where you keep your invoices. In TimePrivate this step is the default rather than a chore, because the database is already a file on your Mac.
Independent contractors get the same list with one addition: the client's system is their record, not yours. If you punch into a portal a client bought, keep a parallel log for yourself, because access to that portal ends when the engagement does. That is exactly the case TimePrivate is built for, and it is the same reasoning behind the TimePrivate timesheet app page.
Toggl Track, Clockify and Harvest all publish a page aimed at freelancers, and all three are accounts on servers those companies run. That is a real trade: you get a team plan, mobile apps and integrations. TimePrivate takes the other trade, and the difference only shows up later.
Cloud trackers stop showing you your own history when you stop paying. TimePrivate keeps hours in a local database on your Mac with CSV export, so the archive is a file that does not check your billing status. If TimePrivate's subscription lapses the app locks and your data stays on your machine, exportable.
Clients query invoices long after the work. What you want then is per entry descriptions and timestamps you can produce quickly. TimePrivate exports the lot to CSV, so the evidence opens in Numbers or Excel without you logging into anything.
Project names, domains you visited, hours per account. Under an NDA that list is itself sensitive. The TimePrivate app makes no network requests at all: no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no account, so the list has nowhere to go.
Trains, planes, a client site with a locked down guest network. TimePrivate has no online mode to lose, so tracking on a plane behaves exactly like tracking at your desk, and nothing queues up waiting to sync.
Optional TimePrivate sync writes end to end encrypted files into a folder you choose, like iCloud Drive or Dropbox. Your cloud provider holds ciphertext only, and TimePrivate runs no server of its own. One license is planned to cover two Macs.
TimePrivate imports history from Toggl, Clockify and Harvest CSV exports and from calendar .ics files, including tags and billable flags, so moving does not mean starting your reporting from zero in January.
The calculator on this page is a one week answer you type in. The TimePrivate Mac app is the same arithmetic happening on its own, every day, in three moves.
TimePrivate's automatic tracking sees which apps you are in and which browser domains you visit, then maps them to clients and projects with rules you write once. App names and domains only, never screenshots and never keystrokes. Forget to start a timer and the afternoon is still there.
Each evening TimePrivate drafts the timesheet from what it saw and hands it to you. Accept it, edit it, or throw it away. Per entry billable control means internal time never drifts onto a client's bill, and idle time is offered back to you when you return to the desk rather than being quietly kept.
TimePrivate turns them into branded PDF invoices with your rates, tax, expenses, due dates and a pay online link, plus invoice history, statuses, overdue badges and duplicate for next month. All of it offline, with no invoicing service in the middle. The rest of what the TimePrivate app does with those hours is on the home page.
Worth saying plainly before you join a waitlist. TimePrivate is a narrow tool on purpose, and four kinds of freelancer are better served elsewhere.
TimePrivate is not released. There is no download, no trial and no purchase, and no date is being promised. If you have to bill on Friday, use one of the established tools and take the calculator above as the free part.
There is no team dashboard, no approval queue and no way to see anyone else's hours in TimePrivate. Once you are approving a subcontractor's timesheet you want the tools built for that, and they are not this.
TimePrivate ships on Apple Silicon Macs first and Windows is on the roadmap. There is no mobile app, so if you start and stop timers on a job site from a phone this is the wrong shape. The calculator on this page runs in any browser, including on a phone.
TimePrivate is planned as a subscription, $9 a month or $79 a year, with no free tier. Several cloud trackers do have free plans. The honest trade is that their free plan is funded by an account on their servers, and TimePrivate's price is what replaces that.
One more limit, because it gets blurred: TimePrivate does not stop other software on your Mac from watching you, and it cannot. It simply is not one of those programs. There is no manager view, no screenshots and no keystroke logging to switch on, which is the whole of what TimePrivate deliberately leaves out. This website is a separate thing from the app and does run Google Analytics, PostHog and Microsoft Clarity, all named in the TimePrivate privacy page. The calculator above is marked as masked for those tools, and its arithmetic happens in your browser either way.
Common questions about freelance time tracking apps, the billable hours calculator on this page, and the TimePrivate Mac app.
Agree the billing unit with the client in writing, record hours the same day you work them, tag every entry to a client with a billable or not billable flag, write one line describing what you did, and export your own copy to CSV so the record does not live only inside someone else's account. A freelance time tracking app like TimePrivate automates the middle three: it drafts the day from the apps and domains you actually used, and you approve it.
The same routine, with one addition. If the client gives you their portal to punch into, that record belongs to them and your access ends with the engagement, so keep a parallel log of your own. Contractors bill several clients at different rates, so the entry has to carry the rate as well as the hours, which is what the TimePrivate billable hours calculator and the TimePrivate app both assume.
TimePrivate cannot honestly answer that with its own name: it is planned as a subscription at $9 a month or $79 a year, and it is not released yet. The free part of TimePrivate is the billable hours calculator on this page, which needs no account. If you are shortlisting free apps, judge them on four things: can you export to CSV, does a rate and a billable flag live on each entry, does tracking work with no connection, and what happens to your history the day you stop using the free plan.
Free plans are real, and for a solo freelancer they are often enough. What free rarely changes is where the record sits: your hours, clients and project names are still rows in a company's database, under terms that can be revised, and the free tier is usually the one that gets features moved out of it. Read the export options before you type a year into it. That is the same advice TimePrivate would give about itself.
Your effective hourly rate is what you invoiced divided by every hour you worked, including the unbilled ones. Bill 21 hours at $100 and put another 5 into revisions you did not charge for, and the $100 rate was an $80.77 rate. The TimePrivate calculator shows both figures because the gap between them is the number that decides whether a client is worth keeping.
No. The TimePrivate billable hours calculator computes inside your browser and there is no submit step, so nothing you type is sent to a server. Download CSV builds the file in the page as well. The table is also marked as masked for the analytics tools this website runs, which are listed on the TimePrivate privacy page.
TimePrivate has no online mode to lose, because the app makes no network requests at all. Tracking on a plane behaves exactly like tracking at your desk. Optional sync is the one part that touches a folder, and it writes end to end encrypted files that your cloud provider cannot read.
Yes. TimePrivate imports CSV exports from Toggl, Clockify and Harvest, and calendar .ics files, including tags and billable flags. Your reporting does not restart from zero when you switch, which matters most if you switch mid year.
It produces them. Approved hours become branded PDF invoices with your rates, tax, expenses, due dates and a pay online link, and TimePrivate keeps invoice history, statuses, overdue badges and a duplicate for next month action. It is all offline, so you send the PDF however you already send files.
No. It is not released, so there is nothing to download and nothing to pay for today. The waitlist is the whole offer: one email the day it opens. Planned pricing is $9 a month or $79 a year, subscription only, on Apple Silicon Macs first with Windows on the roadmap.
TimePrivate's billable hours calculator is free and stays that way, so run your week through it every invoice day. When you want those totals to appear without typing them, the TimePrivate Mac app is what the waitlist is for. One email the day it opens, nothing else.
Not released yet. Leave your email and we will write to you the day it opens.