One page, two jobs. What offline time tracking actually means in the TimePrivate Mac app, and the whole privacy policy underneath it in plain language.
TimePrivate is offline time tracking in the strict sense: the TimePrivate Mac app makes no network requests at all, so there is no online mode for a dropped connection to interrupt. Most products that rank for this term mean something narrower. They keep a local queue while the wifi is down and upload it to the vendor's servers when it comes back. TimePrivate has no servers to upload to.
The rest of this page is the TimePrivate privacy policy in full. An offline claim and the policy behind it belong in the same place, which is why they are both here.
Search the term and you get two different products wearing the same label. The difference is not a feature, it is where your hours sit once the day is over.
The tracker keeps recording while the network is down and flushes the queue to the vendor's servers when it returns. Useful on a train. Read the feature lists on the pages that rank for offline time tracking and you also find offline GPS, live location, screenshot capture and selfie clock in advertised as offline features, because those tools are sold to employers watching staff.
The TimePrivate Mac app has no account, no server and no queue. Nothing is held back for later upload because there is no later upload. That is a smaller promise than "works when the wifi drops" and a much harder one to walk back, since adding a sync-to-us feature later would mean rewriting this policy in public.
Ask any offline time tracking tool one thing: after the sync finishes, who else can open the record? If the answer names an administrator, a workspace owner or a support team, you bought delayed uploading, not offline tracking. TimePrivate's answer is that no sync to us exists, so nobody at TimePrivate can open anything.
An offline time tracking claim is only worth something if the list of what gets written down is short and specific. Here is TimePrivate's, in both directions.
TimePrivate notices which application is in front of you and which domain the browser is on, then maps that to a project using rules you wrote. Domains, not URLs. It is enough to rebuild a day and not enough to reconstruct what you read.
Each evening TimePrivate drafts the timesheet from what it saw and waits for you. Accept it, edit it, or throw it away. Nothing books itself into your week, so the offline record is the one you signed off on rather than a raw activity feed.
The TimePrivate app takes no screenshots, logs no keystrokes, reads no GPS and has no webcam access and no manager view. Those are the four features the offline tracker category advertises most loudly, and they are the ones TimePrivate has chosen not to build.
Every hour TimePrivate tracks lands in a database file on your own disk, with CSV export whenever you want it. That is what makes the offline claim checkable rather than a slogan: there is a file, it is yours, and you can open it.
This is the whole policy, in plain language. It has two halves, because the TimePrivate app and the timeprivate.com website behave differently and blurring them would be dishonest. This page is the disclosure half; the contract half, covering the waitlist, the planned subscription and who owns the hours you track, sits in the TimePrivate terms of use.
TimePrivate the application makes no network requests. It has no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no account system. Your tracked time lives in a local database on your computer. If you enable sync, the app writes end-to-end encrypted files into a folder you choose; we never see them and could not read them if we did. There is no manager view, no screenshot capture and no location tracking to switch on, which is the practical reason the offline behaviour described above cannot quietly change on you.
If you join the waitlist we store the email address you enter, the time you submitted it, and your browser's user-agent string, so we can tell you when TimePrivate launches. This site also uses Google Analytics, PostHog and Microsoft Clarity to count visits and see which pages people read, which sets cookies in your browser. No advertising pixels. None of this touches the app, which stays offline and silent as described above. Want your email removed? Reply to any email we send and say so.
A website that measures its own traffic sitting in front of an app that collects nothing is the honest description of TimePrivate, and it is the line you should expect any offline time tracking tool to draw as plainly. The tools named above run on timeprivate.com pages you are reading right now. They do not run inside the Mac app, they have no way to reach it, and nothing you track in the app is visible to them. If a competing offline tracker cannot tell you which side of that line each claim sits on, treat the claim as marketing.
Last updated August 2026.
TimePrivate's offline design rules out entire categories of work, and it is cheaper for everyone if you find that out here rather than in week two.
You need to see other people's hours in one dashboard, approve their timesheets or run payroll from them: TimePrivate has none of that, and the offline architecture is exactly why. You need GPS, live location or proof-of-presence photos for a field crew: TimePrivate does not record location at all, and the offline trackers built for that job will serve you better. You are on Windows or Linux today: the TimePrivate app ships on Apple Silicon Macs first, though the free browser tools here work anywhere, including the TimePrivate work hours calculator and the TimePrivate timesheet template. And the honest limit on the privacy claim itself: TimePrivate cannot stop other software your employer installs on your Mac from watching you. It simply is not one of those programs. The full list of what TimePrivate deliberately leaves out is on the home page.
What people ask about offline time tracking, answered for TimePrivate specifically, including the cases where the answer is no.
In TimePrivate, yes, because there is no online mode to fall back from. The app makes no network requests, so tracking on a plane, in a basement or on a client site with a locked down guest network behaves exactly like tracking at your desk. Nothing is queued for upload, because there is nowhere for it to upload to.
No. That is the difference between TimePrivate and an offline mode bolted onto a cloud tracker. A cloud tracker keeps a local queue while the network is down and flushes it to the vendor's servers when the network returns, which makes the offline period a delay rather than a boundary. TimePrivate has no server, no account and no queue, so there is nothing to flush.
Yes, dozens of them, and the trade is usually the same one: the tracker is free because your hours live in the vendor's account, where an administrator or a future owner of the company can read them. TimePrivate splits it differently. The free part is the TimePrivate work hours calculator, a free page on this site that totals a week of shifts in your browser and asks for no email and no sign up. The TimePrivate Mac app is not free: planned pricing is $9 a month or $79 a year, subscription only.
There is no single answer, so use a test instead. Ask where the hours are written, whether you can export them to CSV on day one, and whether anyone other than you can open the account. An app that is free because the record sits in a workspace your employer or your client pays for is free for a reason. TimePrivate does not compete on free: the app is planned at $9 a month or $79 a year, subscription only, and the free thing TimePrivate offers is the browser calculator on this site.
Not TimePrivate. The TimePrivate app has no GPS, no live location and no map view, and adding them would contradict the policy on this page. Several products that rank for offline time tracking do advertise offline GPS and live location, because they are sold to employers who want to know where staff are. If that is your requirement, TimePrivate is the wrong tool and you should shop that category instead.
It depends on who the record is for. If a manager approves your hours, the best tool is whatever your employer already runs, because your copy will not be the one that counts. If the hours are yours to defend on an invoice, in a review or in a dispute, the useful question is where the file lives. TimePrivate is built for that second case: a local database on your Mac, CSV export, no manager view and no approval queue.
The database and any CSV files you exported stay on your Mac, because they were never anywhere else. TimePrivate is planned as a subscription, so a lapsed subscription is a question about the app rather than about your records: the hours are already sitting in a file on your own disk instead of in an account somebody else can close.
No. There is nothing to download and nothing to buy today. The TimePrivate waitlist is the whole offer: one email on 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.
The TimePrivate policy above is short on purpose, because a long one is usually hiding something. When the TimePrivate Mac app opens, the waitlist gets one email and nothing else.
Not released yet. Leave your email and we will write to you the day it opens.