Know what the roadmap actually cost
A startup's engineering time is its largest expense and the one nobody can account for. The board asks what the last quarter went on; the honest answer is that roughly half went to the roadmap and the rest disappeared into support, migrations, a customer who needed hand-holding and two weeks nobody can name. The same gap shows up later and more expensively at R&D tax credit time, when a claim needs contemporaneous records and what exists is a reconstruction written the week before the deadline.
What goes wrong today
If none of these are familiar, this probably is not your problem.
- No defensible answer to what a shipped feature cost in engineering weeks, so every roadmap estimate is argued from opinion.
- R&D tax relief claims supported by timesheets reconstructed months later, which is the first thing an enquiry asks about.
- Contractor invoices approved without anything to reconcile them against.
- Firefighting and customer support quietly absorbing a third of the sprint, visible only as the sprint missing.
- A team of fifteen who would walk out over surveillance software, so the founders deploy nothing and stay blind.
What changes
With privacy-by-default metadata tracking.
- Engineering time attributed to a project as it happens, so the cost of a feature is a number rather than a recollection.
- Contemporaneous records for an R&D claim — captured on the day, with adjustments marked as adjustments and audited rather than overwriting the original.
- Contractor hours reconcilable against the invoice, per project and per day.
- The split between roadmap, support and unplanned work visible during the quarter rather than after it.
- A rollout a small technical team will accept: keystroke content is never captured, screen capture is off by default, and the person can see what is being collected on their own machine and pause it.
What the design guarantees
- manual-adjustments-audited
- A manually adjusted timesheet is marked as adjusted and audited; captured data is never silently overwritten.
- no-keystroke-logging
- Keystroke content is never captured — there is no code path that records what a person types.
- no-productivity-score
- ActivityPulse reports what happened and does not grade the person it happened to — there is no productivity score.
- no-double-count
- An hour is never counted twice: each activity segment carries a UUIDv7 the server upserts on, so a retried sync adds nothing.
Questions from teams like yours
Can we use this to support an R&D tax credit claim?
It produces the kind of record these schemes ask for: time attributed to a project on the day it was worked, rather than apportioned afterwards from memory. Manual adjustments are supported, marked as adjustments and audited, so a corrected figure still shows what was originally captured. Whether a particular project qualifies is a question for your adviser — this answers the separate question of whether you can evidence the hours.
We are fifteen people and everyone already trusts each other. Why would we deploy this?
Trust is not the problem it solves. The problem is that nobody can tell you what the last quarter cost, and by the time that matters — a board deck, a tax claim, a pricing decision — the information no longer exists to be recovered. It is cheaper to have captured it than to reconstruct it.
Will this turn into a productivity score our investors ask about?
No. Producing a headline productivity score is an explicit non-goal and the product is built not to compute one. The unit is time attributed to work, not a rating attached to a person.
What happens to the data if we are acquired or wind down?
Each organisation's data lives in its own database rather than in a shared table filtered by an id, so export and deletion act on one company's data as a unit. Erasure requests are supported for individuals within that.
Do contractors need to be on it too?
Only if you want their hours attributed the same way. The agent runs on Windows and macOS, and scope is set per person, so a contractor can be configured more narrowly than an employee — never more broadly.
See where the hours actually went
Free for up to three people. Windows and macOS. No keystroke content on any plan, and screenshots off unless an administrator turns them on.