Writing about Deski?
Ask and we’ll unlock the full app on your account for 30 days — no card, no checkout, nothing to cancel. Fill in the form below; everything else you need to write the piece is on this page.
Request a review copy
Two fields. We’ll email you a confirmation link, then a licence for the address below — there’s no key to enter and no payment step to skip past. Running short near the end of the 30 days? Just ask and we’ll extend it.
No conditions. Genuinely.
There’s no approval, no script, no embargo, and no expectation that you cover Deski at all. If you try it and it isn’t for you, that’s a perfectly good outcome and we’d still like to hear why. That promise is written down rather than just said — see the Creator & Reviewer Terms.
One ask in return, and it’s the law in most places as well as the decent thing: say the copy was given to you. A line in the description or near the top of the piece is plenty.
What Deski is, in one paragraph
Deski is a local-first desktop time tracker for Windows. It runs quietly in the background, notices when you’re working, and shows the day back to you as time blocks, charts and tags. It’s built for freelancers and anyone who bills by the hour: you can turn a week of tracked time into a timesheet or an invoice without retyping any of it.
The part that makes it unusual is where the data lives. Everything Deski records goes into a SQLite file on your own machine and stays there. There is no account sync, no cloud dashboard, no team analytics, and no server that could be breached, because there is nothing on a server to breach.
The privacy claims, and how to check them
These are the ones worth verifying rather than repeating, so here is exactly what to look for:
| Claim | What it means precisely |
|---|---|
| Keystrokes are counted, never recorded | The database stores a tally and a timestamp. There is no column for which key was pressed — the listener discards it before anything is written. Deski cannot reconstruct what you typed because it never had it. |
| No mouse coordinates | Clicks and movements are recorded as a kind and a time. The pointer’s position on screen is never stored. |
| No window or application titles | Deski does not record which app you were in or what the window was called. What a block was for is whatever you name it. |
| Clearing means gone | Clearing a range deletes the blocks and the raw events beneath them, then compacts the file so the freed pages are overwritten rather than left recoverable. |
| Nothing is uploaded | The app loads no remote resources at all — a content-security policy in the build enforces it. The only network traffic is checking your subscription is still valid. |
If you want to check rather than take our word for it, the app writes to a plain SQLite file you can open with any SQLite browser. We’ll happily point you at it, and we’d rather you looked.
The facts
| Platform | Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit. macOS and Linux are not released. |
|---|---|
| Price | $9.99/month, or $99.99/year (a 16% saving) |
| Free trial | 14 days for the general public at launch — Deski is not on sale yet. A card is collected at checkout, but $0 is charged during the trial. |
| Data storage | A local SQLite file. Nothing is uploaded. |
| Built with | Rust (Tauri) and TypeScript |
| Made by | One person |
| Payments | Freemius, as Merchant of Record |
Please check the price and trial length against the pricing section before you publish — this page is maintained by hand and that one is the live figure.
Screenshots and logo
Please use these rather than re-shooting the UI — they are at full resolution and in both themes. Right-click and save, or ask us for anything specific, including a shot with realistic data in it.
Name and logo
- The product is Deski — capital D, no space.
- The icon is a teal DK monogram: favicon.svg (vector) or PNG on white.
- The brand colour is #00685f.
Things people get wrong
- It is not employee monitoring. There is no admin view, no team dashboard, and no way for anyone else to see your data. It is a tool for tracking your own time.
- It does not take screenshots. Some trackers in this category do. Deski has no screen-capture code in it at all.
- It is not a keylogger, despite counting keystrokes. See the table above — there is nowhere for a key to be stored even if we wanted it stored.
- There is no free tier. There is a trial, then it is paid.
Ask us anything
Happy to answer questions on the record, explain a design decision, or dig out a number. [email protected] reaches the person who built it.