DayReplay

DayReplay is a desktop time tracker for Windows and macOS that reconstructs your workday from what you actually did, instead of from timers you remembered to start. It samples the foreground application and browser context in the background, groups those samples into readable sessions, and hands you a timeline you can review at the end of the day. It's aimed squarely at people who bill for their hours and keep losing money in the gap between doing the work and writing it down.

The problem it goes after is manual reconstruction. Anyone who invoices hourly knows the Friday afternoon ritual of staring at a calendar, a browser history, and a commit log, trying to remember what happened on Tuesday. Timers are the usual answer, but they only work if you never forget to start one, and a fragmented day full of context switches is exactly when you forget. DayReplay drops the discipline requirement by capturing passively and letting you sort the record out afterward.

Capture runs on a five-second interval. The app snapshots the foreground window's process name and title, and for tracked browsers it also reads the active tab's URL plus the titles of the other open tabs in that window. On Windows it enumerates the foreground through Win32 APIs and pulls tab data via UI Automation from Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. On macOS it uses the Accessibility API and covers Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Safari, which means granting the Accessibility permission the first time you run it. Raw events then merge into sessions using three timing rules, a five-second capture interval, a ninety-second gap threshold that starts a new session, and a ten-second minimum that drops noise. Sessions group by domain, so clicking around inside one site stays a single block rather than shattering into fragments.

Privacy is the structural argument here, and it's specific rather than hand-waved. There are no screenshots, no screen recording, no keylogging, and no clipboard, microphone, or camera access. There's no analytics, no telemetry, and no remote crash reporting. Captured activity lands in a single SQLite file under your user profile, set to mode 0600 on macOS, and you can open it with any SQLite browser to read the tables yourself. The only outbound calls are update checks and license validation, and license keys live in OS-native secret storage, Keychain on macOS and DPAPI on Windows. That posture matters, because this category is crowded with employee-monitoring tools that screenshot your desktop every few minutes.

Categorization is what turns the timeline into something you can invoice against. Out of the box it detects browsers, IDEs, mail clients, and chat apps, and sorts sessions into Development, Communication, Planning, Research, Media, Utilities, or Uncategorized. Free users can read the built-in rules but not change them. Pro adds two editable rule types, domain rules for browser activity so linear.app lands in Planning and github.com lands in Development, and process rules for desktop apps so OUTLOOK.EXE lands in Communication. You can add your own categories and colours too. Pro's CSV export then produces one row per session with start, end, duration, process, URL, domain, tabs, and category, which is a structured artifact you can hand a client or import straight into a billing tool.

It fits contractors, freelancers, agencies, and anyone whose day is too fragmented to run manual timers honestly. It's less useful if your work is one long focused block in a single app, since there isn't much to reconstruct. It's also not a team surveillance product, so a manager hoping to watch staff should look somewhere else.

Access is freemium and the split is reasonable. Free costs nothing and covers today's replay with one-day history, the full app and browser timeline, URL and tab context, detected categories, read-only rules, and email support. Pro runs $7 a month or $59 a year, roughly $4.92 monthly, and unlocks thirty-day history, day navigation, custom categories and colours, rule editing, and CSV export. One license key works on both Windows and macOS across up to five devices, with no account to create. Checkout runs through Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record, and the app revalidates at most once every 24 hours with a seven-day offline grace window so travel doesn't lock you out. The Windows build is an Authenticode-signed MSI for Windows 10 and 11, and the macOS build is a signed, notarized .dmg for macOS 13 and up on Apple Silicon that lives in the menu bar.