About Savanna Time

Why this exists

Automatic time tracking genuinely works. Left to memory, most people cannot reconstruct last Tuesday, and the version they do reconstruct is flattering in predictable ways. A tracker fixes that.

The problem is what you usually have to accept in exchange. The established tools are built for someone watching someone else: your window titles land on a server by default, an employer dashboard is the primary interface, and the privacy settings are somewhere in a submenu, off. The insight is real, but it is priced in surveillance.

Savanna Time takes the useful half — the automatic capture, the productivity scoring, the reports — and rebuilds it so the record lives on your machine and stays there until you decide otherwise.

What we hold to

Your day is yours, structurally

The desktop app writes to a local database first, and that file is the source of truth — not a cache waiting to upload. Everything works with no network at all. Syncing to the dashboard is a decision you make, and you can see exactly what a sync sends.

Exclusions happen before capture, not after

When you mark an app or a site as private, it is never written down in the first place. This is a deliberately different design from recording everything and hiding it in the interface — the second kind of privacy evaporates the moment someone gets the database.

Deterministic, not artificially intelligent

Every score, trend and insight is computed with published arithmetic you can check. No activity data is sent to any external AI vendor, and that is an architectural commitment rather than a current-configuration one. If local models are ever added, they will run on your machine.

The numbers show their working

Your Pulse is a weighted average of the time you categorized, expressed on a scale you defined. When you have no categorized time, it shows nothing rather than zero — because zero already means something specific, and quietly conflating "no data" with "as distracting as possible" is how a metric loses your trust.

Nothing is shared by a default you did not choose

Team features exist, and they start from zero: a new member's share level is none, and only that member can raise it. Colleagues never see your window titles. Email is opt-in, previewable before you subscribe, and every message can be stopped without logging in.

Raw capture is kept, so nothing is a one-way door

Recorded activity is never thinned out to save space, and every derived number can be recomputed from it. If a formula improves, your history is recalculated rather than left inconsistent. The local database is a plain SQLite file you already have on disk, so your history is never locked inside our copy of it.

Where it is

Windows is the daily-driver build; macOS and Linux are early. Download it here.

Who makes it

Savanna Time is built by Alpha Olomi. It is a small, independent project rather than a venture-backed company, which is part of why the incentives point where they do: there is no advertising business and no data to resell underneath it.