Focusly
See where your time goes. Track app and website time, set daily limits, run calm pomodoro focus sessions, and block distracting sites — without an account, without telemetry, and with everything stored on your own device.
Features
A 25-minute pomodoro that quietly nudges you when it's done. No alarms, no shame — pause whenever you need. Track your focus days and watch a streak build, without the productivity-app guilt.
See which apps and sites you actually use, and for how long. No keystrokes, no screenshots, no clipboard — just foreground time on the apps and pages you open.
Soft warnings when you hit a limit on any app or site. Hard termination only when you ask for it. You can always override — Focusly never locks you out.
Block apps during your work hours, or carve out a wind-down window before bed. Live preview shows what's blocked right now.
Why Focusly
Most screen-time and focus apps want you to create an account, sync your activity to their cloud, and pay a monthly subscription. Focusly is none of that. It's a small native app for Windows and macOS that lives on your device, runs offline, and costs nothing.
Your usage history, schedules, and focus sessions live in a single SQLite file on your own laptop. Back it up, move it to a new machine, or delete it with one click. No cloud sync, no account, no "your data is safe with us" fine print.
Focusly only sees which app is in the foreground and which URL is in your browser's address bar. It cannot read what you type, what you copy, or what is on your screen. The brand promise is technical, not just a marketing line.
Run a 25-minute focus session. If you need to step away, pause. If you need to bail, end it. No streak losses, no angry notifications, no "you broke your 14-day streak" emails. The streak is a quiet reward, not a guilt trip.
When Focusly blocks a site or hard-kills an app, there's always a one-click "I really need this for 5 minutes" override. Focusly is a coach, not a jailer. Hard blocks only fire when you asked for them in advance.
The full source is on GitHub under the MIT license. There is no "Pro" tier waiting behind a paywall and there never will be. If you don't trust the build, read the code.
No Electron wrapper, no auto-updater phoning home, no background service you can't quit. The Tauri shell + React UI ships as a single ~30 MB binary per platform that you can install once and ignore.
Privacy
We don't track keystrokes, clipboard, or screenshots. We don't have an account system. We don't phone home. Your usage history, schedules, and focus sessions live in a single SQLite file you can back up, move, or delete at any time.
No analytics. No telemetry. No "anonymous usage data" that isn't actually anonymous. If we add cloud features in the future, they'll be opt-in and end-to-end encrypted.
Read the full privacy doc →All data on disk
MIT licensed
No accounts
No telemetry
Open source
Auditable
your data →
~/Library/Application Support/com.focusly.app/focusly.db
FAQ
Yes. Focusly runs on Windows 10 and Windows 11 as a native app (Tauri + WebView2, not Electron). It tracks how long each application is in the foreground, how long each website stays in your browser's address bar, and lets you set daily limits per app or per category.
Yes. Focusly supports macOS 11 (Big Sur) and later, both Intel and Apple Silicon. It uses the same source tree as the Windows build, just packaged for `.app`.
Apple Screen Time is excellent and built into macOS and iOS, but it only tracks Apple devices, doesn't follow you to your work laptop, and doesn't help with focused work sessions. Focusly is cross-platform, runs on Windows where Apple Screen Time doesn't exist at all, and includes a 25-minute pomodoro with a streak counter — neither of which Screen Time has.
Yes — free forever, no "Pro" tier, no trial period, no feature paywall. The full source is on GitHub under the MIT license, so even if the project disappeared tomorrow, anyone could fork it and keep building.
No. Focusly only reads which app is in the foreground and which URL is in your browser's address bar. It does not read your keystrokes, clipboard, screenshots, or file contents. All data is stored in a single SQLite file on your own device. There is no account, no cloud sync, no telemetry, no analytics. You can verify this by reading the source code on GitHub.
No. There is no account system. Download, install, run. Your data lives in a single file on your laptop; if you switch to a new machine, copy the file.
Yes. Focusly writes blocked sites to your system hosts file,
which works on Windows 10, Windows 11, and all modern browsers. The
Focusly block page opens in your browser when you try to visit a blocked
domain, and you can always unblock for 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour, or
permanently from the app.
Yes — fully offline. The app only needs a network connection for the optional Chromium extension (the Focusly Blocker, which lets you block websites directly in your browser). The main desktop app is 100% offline.
Functionally, yes — Focusly does what RescueTime and Freedom do (app and website tracking, blocking, focus sessions). The differences: Focusly is free, open source, local-first, and does not require an account. RescueTime syncs to the cloud and charges a subscription. Freedom also charges a subscription and requires an account.
Open an issue on the GitHub Issues page. For private questions, email privacy@focusly.so.