What local-first time tracking actually means
Almost every time tracker on the market is built on the same assumption: that the record of your working day belongs on someone else's server. Usually that someone is your employer, and often the tracker was bought specifically so they could look at it. Screenshots on an interval. A live activity feed. A productivity percentage next to your name on a dashboard you can't see.
Deski starts from the opposite assumption. The record of your day is yours, it stays on your machine, and nobody else gets a copy — including us. That's what "local-first" means here, and it's worth being precise about what it does and doesn't buy you.
Local-first is a claim about where the data physically is
It's not a privacy policy. Policies are promises about what a company chooses to do with data it already holds, and promises can be revised, breached, or subpoenaed. Local-first is a statement about architecture: the data isn't on a server, so there is nothing to revise the policy about.
Concretely, in Deski: everything the app records lives in a single SQLite file on your disk. There's no account sync, no background upload, no telemetry pipeline. If you unplug your network cable, the app works exactly the same, because nothing it does depends on reaching us.
Tracking without watching
There's a second question underneath the storage one, and it matters just as much: what gets recorded in the first place. An app that keeps everything locally can still capture far more than it needs.
Deski works out when you're active from the rhythm of your input, and it deliberately throws away the content:
- Keystrokes are counted, not read. The app tallies how often you type. It never records which keys — so what you typed simply isn't in the data, anywhere.
- Clicks are counted, not located. It records that you clicked, not where on screen. No cursor trail, no heatmap of what you were looking at.
- No screenshots. Ever. There is no capture path in the app.
That's enough signal to turn a working day into clean time blocks — which is the actual job — without building a reconstruction of everything you did.
What you give up
Local-first involves real trade-offs, and a post that skipped them wouldn't be worth reading.
No cross-device sync. Your desktop and your laptop keep separate histories. There's no server in the middle to reconcile them, which is precisely why there's no server in the middle at all. Deski's answer is export and restore: your whole history is one SQLite file you can copy to another machine and load in a click.
Backups are your job. Cloud trackers back up your data as a side effect of holding it hostage. If your drive dies and you never exported, that history is gone. The file is small and portable — but you have to actually move it somewhere.
No team dashboards. Deski can't show a manager what their reports did today, and won't. If that's the requirement, this isn't the tool.
We think these are the right trades for one person tracking their own work. They are obviously the wrong trades for a surveillance product, which is the point.
Owning the file means owning the data
Because the store is just SQLite, "your data" isn't a marketing phrase. You can open the export in any database tool and run your own queries. You can keep it as a plain archive after you stop using the app. You don't file an export request and wait, because there's no one to file it with.
And when you clear your data, it's wiped from disk rather than flagged as hidden in a table somewhere. Deletion that deletes.
The one thing that isn't local
Honesty requires an asterisk. Deski is paid software, so there is exactly one piece of personal data we hold: your email address, used to sign you in and check whether your subscription is active. Sign-in is a six-digit code sent to that address — there's no password. Payments are handled by Freemius as Merchant of Record, so we never see your card.
Your tracking data is not part of that. It never touches the sign-in service, and it never leaves your machine. The full detail is in our privacy policy, which is written to be read rather than skimmed past.
Why we're building it this way
Time tracking became a category people distrust because the tools were built for whoever was buying them, not whoever was running them. A tracker you install for yourself has no reason to inherit that design. It doesn't need a server, doesn't need your keystrokes, and doesn't need to phone home.
Deski is for Windows and hasn't launched yet. If this is the kind of tool you've been looking for, join the waitlist and we'll tell you when it ships.