The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2013–2017
WakaTime tracks coding time from inside the editor and bootstraps to $10k/month
A side project instruments code editors with heartbeat plugins, so time records itself per project and git branch — no manual timers.
WakaTime
What it had to solve
The project started with a plain gap: programmers found manual time tracking a chore, and popular tools like RescueTime could only report that you were inside a text editor — not which project or branch you were working on. A July 2013 Show HN introduced editor plugins that measured all three automatically.
How it works
WakaTime began with a question its developer kept hitting: how much time do I actually spend coding, and on what? Manual time tracking felt like a chore to most programmers, and the popular RescueTime-style tools had a blind spot — they could see that you were inside your text editor, but not which project you were working on or which branch. WakaTime's answer was to move the tracker into the editor itself, where the answer was already visible.
The July 2013 launch, then called WakaTi.me, introduced an editor plugin that recorded active files and asked about idle gaps, with time broken down by project and by git branch — a granularity the maker highlighted in the thread against RescueTime. Hacker News received it warmly ('a really nice idea', 'getting devs to track time is always a pain'), while the main pushback was privacy: users asked whether file names should leave the machine at all.
The product answered that friction by open-sourcing its integrations and publishing exactly what data was collected, and it kept iterating on the thread's bug reports. By October 2017 the service was big enough that an Indie Hackers interview could headline 'Reaching $10k monthly revenue', and the developer answering questions in the Hacker News thread described a heartbeat workload costing about $1,600 a month in servers, with engineering posts on scaling SSL and filling gaps in recorded activity.
The thread's own history made the arc visible: commenters pointed back to the 2013 launch, users said a friend had told them about the tool just days earlier, and sceptics who had once told the maker what to change were answered by the growth that followed.
Why it lands
- Automatic capture removed the one thing that kills time tracking: the user's memory and discipline — nothing is started, paused or entered by hand.
- The editor plugin carried context generic trackers lacked: file, project and git branch, which made the data useful for project-level reporting rather than just 'you were in an editor'.
- Open-source integrations and a transparent data-collection policy defused the privacy objection that dominated the launch thread.
- The maker stayed in the discussion, fixed reported bugs the same day and let the product evolve with the community that found it.
What it did
The 2013 launch thread drew 126 points and comments calling it 'a really nice idea' and noting that 'getting devs to track time is always a pain'. Four years later an Indie Hackers interview headlined 'Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime' was posted to Hacker News, where it drew 399 points and 163 comments, and users described discovering the tool by word of mouth.
What you can take
Make measurement a by-product of work: when the user does nothing, data collects itself — instrument the editor with project and branch context, not a generic app that cannot tell what you are doing.
Since then
WakaTime outlived the write-up. The 2017 thread shows the developer answering infrastructure questions and linking engineering posts about scaling, and the open-source plugin set kept expanding across editors. As of 2026 the service is still live as 'dashboards for developers', has repositioned itself around AI coding analytics — tracking AI-generated code, model usage and cost — and its homepage claims more than 500,000 developers, making the editor-heartbeat idea the durable core of a decade-old bootstrapped product.
Sources
- Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project (Hacker News discussion)
- Show HN: My time tracking tool for your text editor
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