SMF·HUBSTAFF
Can a prompt replace Hubstaff?
Time tracking — workforce monitoring and payroll
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
What Hubstaff sells is not a timer, it is a chain that ends in money moving: tracked hours, an activity score, an approved timesheet, and an automatic payment to a contractor in another country. The paying half needs money-transmission partners and the monitoring half needs software installed on machines you administer and a lawful basis to watch people work. Neither belongs in a personal build. The consolation build here monitors exactly one person: you.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a personal activity monitor. It watches one machine — yours — and nothing leaves it.
Be explicit in the README about scope: this is self-measurement. Deploying anything like it on other people's machines raises consent and employment-law obligations that differ by country and are not a technical matter.
Stack: a small desktop agent plus a local web dashboard. Any language with OS-level window APIs; SQLite for storage; everything on localhost with no remote endpoint at all.
The agent samples every few seconds and records: the active application, the window title, and whether input has occurred since the last sample. It never captures screen content and never records keystrokes — say so in the README and mean it.
Derived measures:
- **Idle**: no input for longer than a configurable threshold ends the current block. On return, prompt once for what that gap was, with options to discard it, mark it as a break, or assign it to a project.
- **Sessions**: contiguous activity in one category, with a minimum length so a two-second glance at a browser does not fragment an hour of work.
- **Context switches per hour**, which is a more honest attention measure than any single focus score.
- **Categories**: you assign applications and window-title patterns to categories yourself. Ship no default classification — an inherited productivity rating is somebody else's opinion about your work.
Privacy controls, first-class rather than an afterthought:
- A pause button that stops sampling entirely, with the paused periods visible as such rather than silently missing.
- Per-application title redaction: for chosen apps, store only the application name, never the window title.
- Retention: raw samples are deleted after N days by default, leaving only the aggregates. Make N small.
- One command that deletes everything.
Dashboard: a day timeline, category totals, context switches per hour, and a week-over-week trend. CSV export.
Write tests for idle detection at the threshold boundary, for session merging with a short interruption, and for retention actually removing raw rows.
Do not add remote reporting, screenshots, keystroke logging, or any way to observe another machine.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 tracking anyone but yourself, which is the entire commercial product
- B.2 automatic payments to contractors through payroll partners
- B.3 timesheet approval workflows and locked pay periods
- B.4 GPS, geofencing and job-site clock-in
- B.5 the mobile and desktop apps published and signed by a vendor
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: payments and workforce compliance
Because paying twelve contractors in nine countries from approved timesheets is a compliance and payments problem, not a tracking problem, and Hubstaff has the partners for it.
Questions
Why refuse screenshots when the paid product has them?
Because a local screenshot archive is a liability with no upside for self-measurement — it captures passwords, private messages and client data — and because the moment you build it, the tool becomes something you could point at someone else.
Why ship no default app classification?
Because "productive" is contextual: a browser is research for one person and procrastination for another, and inheriting a vendor's ratings is how these tools produce numbers that feel unfair. Ten minutes of self-classification is more accurate than any default.
Is monitoring employees legal if I build it myself?
It depends heavily on jurisdiction, and building it yourself removes none of the obligations. In much of Europe, continuous monitoring needs a documented lawful basis, proportionality, and notice to the people monitored. That is why this prompt is scoped to your own machine.
What does the two-seat minimum mean in practice?
That the advertised $4.99 is never the real floor — the cheapest Hubstaff account is two seats, so about $9.98 a month on annual billing, even for a solo user.
Related tools
Receipt