George Clinkscales Jr.

The Problem

Freelancers and small teams needed a way to track billable hours and generate invoices without paying $10–20/month for features they'll never use. The goal was one app that works everywhere — phone, watch, laptop, browser — with a pricing model that matches how people actually use it: free to try with no time limit, $9.99 once for solo professionals who want everything, and $4.99/month for teams that need collaboration and invoicing.

Mobile Experience

The native iOS experience is powered by SwiftUI, ActivityKit Live Activities, and WidgetKit, paired with a fully responsive web landing page and dashboard.

Landing page — mobile layout

Architecture

Tally is a native iOS app (iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac via Catalyst) paired with a React web dashboard, both running on a shared Supabase backend. Buying Pro on iOS unlocks the web too — StoreKit and Stripe both write to the same subscription record in the database, so neither platform has to check two payment systems.

Auth

Authentication supports email/password, Sign in with Apple, and Sign in with Google on both iOS and web. The web app includes a full forgot password flow — users request a reset link, Supabase emails it via Resend over custom SMTP, and a recovery token handler in the React app detects the link regardless of where Supabase redirects and presents the reset form. A built-in bug report modal (also powered by Resend) is surfaced on the landing page, login page, and inside the dashboard settings — so users can report issues from anywhere without leaving the app.

Web login — Sign in with Google and Apple

Bug report modal — powered by Resend

Business Tier

The Business tier adds team workspaces with admin and member roles enforced at the database level via row-level security — not just in the UI — plus a shared weekly hour goal per workspace so teams can track progress against a client contract. Invoice generation pulls from tracked sessions with draft → sent → paid status tracking, outstanding balance summaries, and one-click email delivery to clients via Resend. Stripe webhooks, transactional email, and team invites all run in Supabase Edge Functions (Deno), so there's no Node server to maintain or deploy.

iOS Integration

The iOS app integrates deeply with the OS: ActivityKit powers a Live Activity on the lock screen and Dynamic Island so the running timer is always visible without opening the app. WidgetKit adds a home screen widget in small and medium sizes. App Intents expose Siri shortcuts for starting and stopping a timer, and a Focus Mode filter lets Tally automatically activate when a work focus is on.

Lock screen Live Activity — check your timer without unlocking

Large widget — weekly hours and goal progress

Small widget — start timer and goal percentage

Core Features

• Timer with pause/resume and manual session entry
• "Log again" shortcut — re-open the same client and task from any recent session
• Weekly hour goal with per-client sub-goals and progress bars
• Budget tracker per client — progress bar turns red when over budget
• Reports showing hours and earnings side-by-side with period-over-period comparison
• Session calendar and CSV export
• Web app adds voice control — say "start", "pause", or "save" to control the timer hands-free

Web Dashboard

Built with React and Vite — a time tracker has no SEO requirements, so it deploys as static files on Vercel with no framework overhead. The public demo account is seeded with realistic sessions that automatically adjust to the current week — a GitHub Actions cron job runs nightly to delete and re-seed data, so the dashboard always shows meaningful numbers no matter when someone visits.

What Was Hard

This was my first cross-platform project — keeping iOS, watchOS, Mac, and a React web app in sync against one backend required every layer to be correct at once.

Payments were the other wall. Wiring StoreKit and Stripe to write to the same subscription record — so iOS Pro unlocks the web without checking two systems — took longer than any single feature. Getting App Store approval took nearly 10 rejections. Each one came back with a different guideline violation, and I worked through every one until it shipped.

The Outcome

75 downloads and 16.8K+ App Store impressions in the first two weeks. Tally is the most complex thing I've built — not because any single piece is hard, but because four platforms, two payment systems, and a shared backend require every layer to be correct at once. It all has to work, and it does.