Your time, dimensioned.

Important

PrimeTime is rebranding for 1.0! Thank you to our early testers and users. The name change will require an update to the brew tap and will impact the in-app auto-updater, so you'll likely need to install the app under its new name when 1.0 is released. Apologies for any inconvenience.

PrimeTime is a macOS menu-bar time tracker that marks and divides your time exactly how you want. Attach key: value labels to every span — inspired by Prometheus metrics — and your time becomes queryable data, not entries filed into one rigid hierarchy. Start a timer in one keystroke, run several at once, then see where the day actually went. Offline-first: no account, no server, no network required.

Install

brew install --cask sf1tzp/tap/primetime

Or download the latest notarized build from GitHub releases: unzip and drag PrimeTime.app into Applications. Either way the app keeps itself current — updates arrive in-app via Sparkle.

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later on Apple silicon.

Time, measured on your terms

• Mark and divide time exactly how you want — flexible key: value labels (repo: app, type: review, team: platform) make your time queryable across any axis you invent, without deciding a hierarchy up front.
• Multi-task in the modern era — multiple concurrent timers, flexible after-the-fact editing, and note-taking, because real work overlaps, gets interrupted, and needs correcting.
• Visualize your workday — see where the day actually went in calendar and chart views built from your own labels.
• Own your data — everything lives in a local SQLite store on your Mac. Sync is optional and goes through a server you host.

Scriptable from the terminal

The app bundles a primetime CLI (at PrimeTime.app/Contents/Helpers/primetime) that works on the same local store:

primetime start -l repo=app -l type=review   # errors if a timer is running
primetime status --json                      # exit 0 running / 1 idle
primetime stop

primetime export > backup.json               # the full schema-versioned document
primetime export --from 2026-07-01 --to 2026-07-31 --include repo:app | jq

Data goes to stdout so it pipes; logs go to stderr. A running app picks up CLI-started timers immediately. Filtered exports record their filter, so a partial export can't pass for a full backup.

A look inside

Log

An editable record of your time: days, entries, notes, and running totals — nothing hidden. Adjust start/end times, labels, and notes after the fact.

History

Donut and per-day charts over any grouping — and a second grouping to compare against, so "time by type" and "time by project" sit side by side.

Label Review

Vocabulary drifts — one week says project, a stray day says proj. Label Review shows every key and value with usage counts, and cleans up drift with a drag or a rename.

There's more — a launcher of one-click label-set cards, a calendar where overlapping timers share columns, and an interactive onboarding that teaches the label model. See every surface in motion at primetime.tools/features.

Try it: Demo Mode

Every capture above is Demo Mode — a seeded, throwaway copy of the app's data with a week of realistic history and two running timers. It can't touch real data: it lives in its own demo.sqlite (rebuilt on every launch) and a scratch settings domain.

git clone <this repo>
cd PrimeTime
swift build
./.build/debug/PrimeTime --demo

Look for the timer in the menu bar. Launch without --demo to start tracking for real.

Sync with PrimeTime Server — optional

PrimeTime is local-first: the app is fully functional offline, and the local store stays the source of truth. When you want your history on more than one Mac — or shared across a team — run PrimeTime Server: a headless GraphQL backend, derived from traggo/server and evolved into the PrimeTime v1 API (label vocabulary, per-value colors, server-side label sets). It ships as a single container backed by SQLite.

Connect in Settings → Sync: enter your server URL, sign in, and your local history uploads and stays in sync from then on.

Import from Traggo

Coming from Traggo? Settings → Import from Traggo copies a Traggo server's full history — finished and running timespans, plus tag keys and their colors — into the local database. Safe to run again: already-imported timespans are updated, not duplicated.

Development

A justfile is included for the edit-build-run loop:

just run-dev

It codesigns the debug binary with a local TraggoMenuApp Dev certificate so that Keychain access survives rebuilds. Create a self-signed certificate with that name in Keychain Access if you want the same behavior; plain swift build works fine otherwise (Demo Mode never touches the Keychain at all).

To remove local data and get a fresh install:

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/PrimeTime && defaults delete PrimeTime

Installed builds are sandboxed and keep everything inside their container instead — remove ~/Library/Containers/tools.primetime.PrimeTime to reset one of those.

Provenance

The server/ tree is derived from traggo/server; its provenance and licensing are documented in server/README.md.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md — in particular the contribution terms (DCO sign-off plus a relicensing grant) that keep PrimeTime's dual-channel distribution possible.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later. The server/ tree is derived from traggo/server and combines GPL-3.0 code with AGPL-3.0-or-later additions — see NOTICE and server/NOTICE for the structure. App-store builds are distributed under separate terms by the copyright holder (NOTICE).