by Almar Klein | published 02-01-2022 | last edited 29-01-2022

2021 report

The year has closed - it's time to reflect.

A new brand, becoming open source

The market of time trackers is very competitive and it's hard to stand out. This year most of the focus went to developing the brand towards a niche where it can shine better; I try to aim for artists and techies who care about values like open source, privacy, web API's, etc.

Early in 2021 TimeTagger was rebranded with a new style and name (it was previously called TimeTurtle), and it was made open source. It also replaced projects for tags for a more unique and flexible workflow.

It has been well received; the Github project has 312 stars at the time of writing. IimeTagger is getting increasingly good feedback, and I try to engage with the users and their wishes (while also protecting the simplicity and core values). Github is a great platform for this.

New features

Many new features have been added in 2021. To name a few: instruction videos, support for setting targets, tag suggestions and presets, Pomodoro, etc.

Financial

We've seen an increase in paying users around the summer, but then it kind of stuck there. The total revenue of 2021 was €256.

The costs are broken down as follows:

Server costs (approximately $50 per month): €528
Domain name: €23

The total costs are approximately €551. I have not included advertising costs here, which are a multitude of that. Of the advertising costs, €867 was spent on EthicalAds, which indirectly helps fund ReadTheDocs.

Contributions to open source

I've pledged to contribute at least 10% of profits to the open source projects that power it. Because the costs are still higher than the revenue (i.e. the profit is negative), I have not made any monetary contributions for this year.

We have still contributed to open source with the TimeTagger project itself, as well as by maintaining the tools we use, including asgineer, itemdb, and pscript.

Looking ahead

Now that we've settled the brand and getting more and more "feature complete", it's time to focus more on marketing and SEO. It's important to make it easier to "be found" by the target audience. I'm already seeing positive signals, and I am optimistic that TimeTagger is able to scale it's userbase significantly in the upcoming year. Whatever happens, the costs are low, and I will keep TimeTagger running for sure!