for data science & analytics · free · open source · macOS

jelly track

Time tracking made for
workers, not managers.

A local, open-source menu-bar time tracker for the data science & analytics community. Click, pick a project, start. Stop when you're done. Your data lives in a SQLite file — write your own reports, or use the reference Quarto docs.

Download for macOS ~7 MB Like it? Support
view source · macOS 12+ · Apple Silicon & Intel
Live · macOS jellytrack.app · menu bar click → pick → start → stop +
jellytrack in the macOS menu bar — start a project, stop when you're done
S · 01 Menu-bar popover, real UI
~1s* click to tracking
0 accounts · teams · roles
1 SQLite file you own
60s grace-window resume
free forever · open source

* assuming you know which project you're working on.

the philosophy

Collect data. Report separately.

Record when it happens. Not as a compliance ritual.

Most time trackers try to be a tracker and a dashboard and a billing tool at once — which means guessing what you want to see, and burying the raw truth under charts. And Friday-afternoon timesheet reconstruction? That's not data, it's fiction.

jellytrack does one job: record what you worked on, and when. The SQLite file sits right there in a schema you can read. Write your own report — sqlite3, DuckDB, pandas, a Jupyter notebook, a Quarto doc, your accountant's spreadsheet.

A time tracker for the AI age. Your data is a plain .db file — bring your favourite companion. Point Claude, Cursor, or ChatGPT at it and ask “how much time did I spend on X this month?” Adapt the report, adapt the app, adapt it to how you work. Nothing walled off.

Built for people who'd rather GROUP BY than click through yet another “insights” tab.

See the reference Quarto reports
R · 01 weekly-hours-by-project Weekly hours by project — a jellytrack-reports Quarto document jellytrack-reports Quarto + R
what it does

Four moves. That's the whole app.

jellytrack is deliberately small. It records what you worked on and when — cleanly, locally, without asking you to build a workflow around it.

F · 01

Menu bar, nothing else.

Click the tray icon, pick a project and task, hit Start. No dock icon. No window in the way.

F · 02

Projects & tasks on the fly.

Add projects and tasks from the same popover. Notes on every entry, autosaved. Manual entries for the times you forgot to start.

F · 03

Grace-window resume.

Restart within 60 seconds on the same project and jellytrack resumes the previous session. No more tiny fragment sessions to clean up later.

F · 04

Your data, in SQLite.

No login. No cloud. No teams. Point pandas, DuckDB, R, or your accountant's spreadsheet at the file.

install

Two ways in. Both under a minute.

jellytrack isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID (why), so macOS will call the download “damaged” the first time. Drag jellytrack.app into /Applications, then remove the quarantine flag once: 

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/jellytrack.app

Repeat once after each update. No telemetry, no login, no cloud.

Prefer to compile it yourself? Full source lives on codefloe. You'll need Bun ≥ 1.1, a Rust toolchain, and Xcode Command Line Tools. 

git clone https://codefloe.com/alpine-jellyfish/jellytrack.git
cd jellytrack
bun install
bun run tauri build

Output lands in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/. Full build instructions →

jelly track

Free. Local. Yours.

Download jellytrack for macOS Fuel the project

Requires macOS 12 or later · Apple Silicon & Intel builds · TWINT appreciated