Wakatime

Free auto-tracking via IDE plugin — sole pick, auto-only, 2-week history

Wakatime

Role

The family’s automatic coding-time tracker — and after the 2026-06-20 walk-back of Toggl Track, the sole time-tracking pick family-wide. An IDE plugin sends heartbeats on file activity to wakatime.com, which classifies them by language / project / file / branch and surfaces daily / weekly / monthly charts. Zero manual timers — if the editor sees the user typing or scrolling, Wakatime captures it. If the editor doesn’t see it, it’s untracked, and that’s intentional.

Sole time-tracking pick. Toggl Track was considered + rejected because it requires manual timer start/stop, which violates the family-wide auto-only-tracking rule locked 2026-06-20. Non-coding time (meetings, planning, calls) is intentionally not tracked rather than manually tracked — manual data decays, and untracked time is honest signal that the user was away from the keyboard. See decisions/architecture/time-tracking-wakatime-only for the walk-back narrative and decisions/architecture/auto-tracking-everywhere for the family-wide auto-only principle.

Free tier

• Auto-tracking via IDE plugin (VS Code, Cursor, Sublime, JetBrains family, Vim, Emacs, Neovim, Visual Studio, Xcode, Atom — 50+ editors)
• Daily / weekly / monthly charts — language / project / editor / OS / file breakdowns
• Rolling 2-week history on the free tier (longer history needs Premium + card; the family solves this by daily lifestream export to JSONL — see below)
• Public dashboard at wakatime.com/@<username> (recruiter- facing) — the user’s @chirag127 profile is already public
• REST API access (wakatime.com/api/v1) for the future lifestream ingest job
• Browser plugins (Chrome / Firefox) optional for research / browsing-time tracking; opt-in.

Card / subscription required?

NO. Free tier sign-up is email or GitHub sign-in. No payment method requested. The 2-week history limitation is mitigated by daily lifestream export to JSONL — the API provides the funnel; JSONL is the durable archive.

Setup (one-time per machine)

# VS Code / Cursor
code --install-extension WakaTime.vscode-wakatime

# JetBrains: Settings → Plugins → Marketplace → "WakaTime"

# API key from wakatime.com/settings/account, written to:
#   ~/.wakatime.cfg     (Linux / macOS / Windows %USERPROFILE%)

API key originates at Doppler per secrets-management-doppler; distributed via doppler run or manual one-time write to the config file.

Lifestream ingest (future)

Per oriz-me-added-to-family

• lifestream-jsonl-canonical:

// Daily cron — pull yesterday's summary, append to JSONL
const r = await fetch(
  'https://wakatime.com/api/v1/users/current/summaries' +
  '?start=' + yesterday + '&end=' + yesterday,
  { headers: { Authorization: 'Basic ' + btoa(API_KEY) } },
);
const { data } = await r.json();
// → { type: "code-summary-wakatime", ts, duration_s, language, project, editor }

This pattern also side-steps the 2-week history limit on the free tier — the JSONL archive is the durable record; Wakatime’s UI is the live dashboard.

Why this is our pick

• Auto-tracking removes the “did I forget to start the timer” failure mode for the surface (coding) where the user spends most of their time.
• Public dashboard at wakatime.com/@chirag127 is a recruiter-facing artifact that documents “what the user actually uses day-to-day.” Pairs with the everything-public-OSS posture per repos-work-independently and the donation rails per max-payment-methods.
• No card — fits rules/no-card-on-file
  • rules/no-subscriptions.
• REST API is well-documented; daily JSONL export pattern works around the 2-week history cap on the free tier.
• IDE-plugin universe covers every editor the family uses (VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains).

Alternatives

• Toggl Track — REJECTED 2026-06-20. Different surface (manual timers for non-coding work) but manual tracking is the rejection axis: violates the auto-only-tracking rule.
• RescueTime — broader auto-tracker (browser, app, category) but full reports require Premium + card; overlaps Wakatime’s coding scope without the IDE-classification depth.
• Code::Stats — similar shape, smaller community, fewer IDE plugins.
• GitHub commit / push activity — already tracked separately by GitHub’s own profile graph; doesn’t capture in-progress edits.
• WakaPI (self-host Wakatime-compatible) — fights the no-self-host posture; the family runs only managed serverless.

Swap cost

Low — Wakatime’s plugin is an IDE-side concern; swapping the upstream means swapping the API key. Per-tool data is exportable via API; the JSONL archive is provider-agnostic.

Privacy posture

• Heartbeat payload includes file path, language, project name, branch, IDE, OS — no file content.
• Default project visibility is private; the user explicitly opts in to public dashboard for @chirag127.
• Per-project privacy can be flipped via wakatime.com/settings for any sensitive repo (none expected given the everything-public-OSS posture, but documented for completeness).

Cross-refs

• Time-tracking — Wakatime only (decision) — walk-back narrative for the original Toggl + Wakatime split
• Auto-only-tracking rule — why this is the sole pick
• Auto-tracking-everywhere decision — family-wide auto-only principle
• Toggl Track — REJECTED counterpart
• Productivity services index
• Lifestream JSONL canonical — future ingest target
• oriz-me added to family — public surface for the dashboard
• Doppler — API key vault
• Repos work independently rule — public dashboard fits OSS posture
• No card-on-file rule

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