Ledger — for macOS

The work journal that doesn’t keep score.

It runs quietly in the background — nothing to start, nothing to stop, no timers to remember. Once a day it tells you one true thing about how you actually worked.

No streak to defend. No productivity score to game. A long week that wrecked you is supposed to look like one.

Download for macOS — free See exactly what it records

Free forever for the daily tool. Pro is $9/month, cancel any time.

One email when the Windows version lands. Nothing else, ever.

Ledger — Home
Afternoon · Thursday, 12 March tracking

2h 41m in this stretch. 1 of your three still open.

0m tracked3 focus blocks6-day streak
code 1h 52m research 31m comms 18m

You’re 41 minutes into a clean stretch.

Only 2 app switches so far.

Your focus usually lands around 9am.

About 40 minutes of that window left today.

Third night past 8pm this week.

You normally wind down around 6:15pm.

Example data, shown to illustrate the interface.

Why this one is different

You’ve tried a time tracker before. You probably stopped using it.

The pattern is familiar: a week of dutiful logging, a dashboard full of charts you never act on, and then a quiet fortnight of avoiding the app because opening it feels like a performance review you didn’t book.

That’s not a discipline problem. A tracker that hands you six charts and no opinion has moved the hard part — working out what any of it means — onto you, at the exact moment you have the least energy for it.

Ledger does that part. It watches quietly, and when it has something worth saying, it says it in a sentence.

What it records

Everything stays on your machine. Here’s the whole of what gets written.

Every five seconds Ledger notes which app is in front, its window title, and how long since you last touched the keyboard. That’s it. The app shows you these exact rows during setup — your own data, before it asks you for anything.

AppWindow titleIdle
Codeobservations.rs — ledger0s
CodeHomeView.tsx — ledger0s
SafariPricing — Acme12s
Slack#design7s
Mail— not available —2s

Never keystrokes. Never screenshots. Never the contents of anything you write, read, or open. It lives in a SQLite file on your own disk, samples older than 90 days delete themselves, and there is no account and no sign-in. Your tracked activity is never uploaded — the only thing that ever leaves is the short daily summary behind a Pro note, and only when you ask for one.

Exporting everything and deleting everything are free on every tier, and always will be. “Your data is yours” can’t have an asterisk.

Deliberate omissions

Things Ledger refuses to do.

  • No productivity score.

    Nothing here compresses your day into a number you can be judged by, including by yourself.

  • Momentum that penalises overwork.

    Seven ten-hour days score lower than five seven-hour ones. That rule is enforced by a test, not a promise.

  • One nudge at a time, at most.

    When several things are worth flagging, it says the most useful one and stays quiet about the rest.

  • No streak guilt.

    A quiet day gets “fifteen honest minutes keeps it alive” — an option, not a countdown.

  • No leaderboards, badges or points.

    You are not competing with anyone, and there is no one to show this to.

  • It says nothing rather than guess.

    Until it has enough history to be sure, it tells you that plainly instead of inventing an insight.

Pricing

Free is a real product. Pro adds the coach.

Tracking runs entirely on your machine and always will. Pro adds a daily note written by Claude from that day’s numbers — which costs us money every time it runs, which is why it’s a subscription rather than a one-off.

Free

$0

Forever. No account.

  • Automatic background tracking
  • Today’s coaching and observations
  • Your three things, and the daily review
  • The last 14 days of history
  • Full export and delete
  • 14 AI notes to try, no card needed
Pro

$9/month

Cancel any time.

  • A daily note written by Claude from your real numbers
  • Patterns — fatigue, weekly rhythm, your real focus hours
  • Your full history, not just a fortnight
  • Goals with targets, milestones and pace estimates
  • Smart reminders you configure

Pro unlocks the long-term memory and the written coaching — the parts that only become useful once you’ve been at it a while, which is also when you can judge whether it’s worth paying for.

Download free Subscribe to Pro — $9/month

The free app needs no account and no card. Pro is $9/month, cancel any time — you'll get a key to paste into Ledger. Payment is handled by Stripe; we never see your card.

Straight answers

What it doesn’t do.

Is there a mobile app?

No. Ledger tracks what you do at a computer, so it’s a desktop app and nothing else. macOS today; the Windows tracking layer is written but not yet shipped.

Does it sync between my machines?

No. Syncing would mean a server, and a server would mean your activity leaving your machine. If you use Ledger on a laptop and a desktop, they each keep their own history.

Can I use it with my team?

No. There is no team view, no admin dashboard and no way for anyone else to see your data. This is a tool for one person, and monitoring software is the opposite of what it’s for.

Does it track websites or specific documents?

It records window titles, which often include the page or file you had open — and only if you grant Accessibility permission. Without that permission it still works, it just sees “VS Code” rather than which project, so its observations are coarser.

Does it use AI?

Tracking doesn’t, and never will — it’s all computed on your machine from your own data, with no account and no connection. The Pro daily note does: when you ask for one, a summary of that day (category names and durations, the priorities you typed, focus and streak counts, and a few of your own averages from recent days) is sent to Anthropic to write it. Never app names, never window titles, never screenshots, never raw activity. Nothing is sent unless you press the button.

What happens if I cancel?

You drop back to Free, which is a complete daily tool rather than a crippled trial — today’s coaching, your three things, the daily review and the last fortnight all keep working. Nothing is deleted, and exporting everything stays free. You just stop getting the written notes and the long-term memory.

What if I reinstall or get a new laptop?

Your subscription comes with a key, shown after checkout and in Settings. Paste it into Ledger on the new machine to restore Pro. Your history moves the way everything else here does — by hand and under your control: export it from the old machine, restore it on the new one from Settings. There’s no cloud copy because there’s no cloud.