Apply HN: Moonlighter – Automatically track projects from computer usage
Moonlighter frees you from using a manual time tracker. You no longer have to remember to start/stop the timer, switch projects, or annotate the current task. It pulls information from your computer (file edits, open applications, browser URLs, etc) and connected services (github, gmail, google docs, etc) and uses machine learning to learn which activities are a part of which projects. All tracking is opt-in only, optionally fully encrypted (although this degrades some features of the user experience).
Right now the focus is time tracking, with plans to expand into project management/reporting tools.
Why (did I build this): I had a day job (well I was a grad student), moonlighting on the side to pay the bills. I always had trouble remembering to track my time accurately, and even more trouble estimating hours for a project. Although I don't bill hourly anymore, I know that accurately tracking my time is essential to preparing a good software estimate.
How (are you going to make money): Initial market and customer interviews are freelance developers/designers, although I've had really good discussions from a number of lawyers.
It uses a B2B SaaS subscription model. The Price will start off lower than advertised and increase as more features are added to the web application.
Where (are the competitors): RescueTime is probably the most closest competitor. They have a lot of similar data, but it is less granular and not currently used for project tracking.
DeskTime is similar but also granular, and especially invasive for individual contributors.
There are plenty of other time trackers/invoicing tools in this space, but many of them simply give the problem a pretty face: Harvest, Toggl, and myriad others. Getting detailed data for automatic project/task annotation and project estimation will be a big undertaking for these.
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