Can AI replace Tallymeter?

KINDA · weekend project

price $10/moyou'd save $120/yrbuild time weekendcategory 🧾 finance & accountingreplaced by 0 peoplebuild unverified

The solo core is a weekend build and nobody should pretend otherwise: a timer, projects with hourly rates, and uninvoiced hours rolled into a numbered PDF. What survives the rebuild is the boring half · two-way Jira worklog sync that reconciles ticket by ticket without double-counting, a hosted MCP server and scoped API tokens your agents can reach from any machine, and invoice numbering plus VAT and bank details that hold up when an accountant reads them. Full disclosure: this entry was submitted by the person who builds Tallymeter. Same rubric as everything else on the list, and the honest answer is that a freelancer billing one client can absolutely one-shot the part they use.

the prompt

Build me a freelance time tracker that produces invoices, like Tallymeter. Requirements:

- Node + Express + better-sqlite3, one process, server-rendered pages on
  localhost:4820. No accounts, no telemetry, everything stays on my machine.
- Tables: clients, projects (hourly rate, currency), entries, invoices.
- One timer, big start/stop button on the index page: starting a new one stops
  the running one first, so two can never run at once. Entries store
  description, project, started_at and ended_at as ISO-8601 UTC.
- Let me edit a finished entry's description in place, and add one after the
  fact with a duration in minutes for the call I forgot to track. Entries
  already on an invoice are frozen, reject the edit.
- An /unbilled page: finished entries with no invoice_id, grouped by project,
  hours shown as "3h 25m" and the money at the project rate.
- Invoice a project's unbilled entries: one line per description with decimal
  hours, sequential INV-2026-001 numbers that are never reused even if I delete
  a draft, bank details and VAT rate from config.json, rendered to
  ./invoices/INV-2026-001.pdf with puppeteer. Stamp invoice_id on what it billed.
- Out of scope: multi-user accounts, payment collection, mobile apps. Skip them.
- README: config.json fields, where the PDFs land, and a warning that the
  sqlite file is the only copy of my billing history · tell me to back it up.

$ open in your agent (prompt prefilled, you press enter) or copy it raw

why people still pay

The timer is a weekend. The failure modes are not. Uninvoiced time that silently double-counts against a Jira worklog, an invoice sequence with a gap in it, or a laptop that was asleep when the agent tried to log its hours are all problems you discover on invoice day, in front of a client. A business billing real money for hours generally decides that maintaining the thing that produces its invoices is not the hobby it wants.

what you lose

xtwo-way Jira Cloud worklog sync that reconciles ticket by ticket

xa hosted MCP server and scoped API tokens agents can call from anywhere, with per-agent attribution

xinvoice numbering, VAT and bank details that survive an accountant handoff

xshared team workspaces and per-member unbilled totals

xmanaged hosting, nightly backups and a phone-sized UI for starting a timer away from your desk

prior art · use these instead of building, if you'd ratherkimaimature self-hosted multi-user time tracking with timesheets, reports and invoices↗solidtimemodern open-source time tracker, the closest self-host starting point↗