Why the "simple" tool I needed didn't exist — so I made it.
For years I did what most freelancers do: I borrowed tools built for someone else.
Every time-tracking app I reached for was beautiful. Polished onboarding, slick dashboards, thoughtful animations. And every single one of them was built for teams — for managers assigning work, for sprints, for capacity planning across ten people. I'm one person. I don't have a sprint. I have a client, a project, and a clock.
The gap was always the same: the basics I actually needed as a freelancer were either buried under features I'd never touch, or locked behind a paywall — while the twenty features I didn't need were front and center and free.
The Asana + Everhour era
Most recently I settled on Asana's free plan. It's genuinely good software. But Asana doesn't track payments — and payments are half of my job. Did the client pay the deposit? What's still outstanding on the fixed-price quote? That's the number that actually keeps the lights on, and it simply wasn't there.
So I bolted on Everhour. It worked. It tracked time, it tracked money. But it also did a hundred other things, most of which I'd never use — and it was one more paid subscription stacked on top of another.
Here's the part that finally broke me: I started spending more time diagnosing my tools than using them. Reconnecting integrations. Fiddling with settings that existed to serve workflows I don't have. The tools were supposed to save me time. Instead they'd quietly become another client — one that never paid me.
What a freelancer actually needs
When I stripped it back, my real requirements fit on a sticky note:
- Clients. People who owe me money.
- Projects. With a rate — hourly, a fixed agreed fee, or nothing at all for personal work.
- Tasks. With a timer. Start, stop, done.
- Payments. Not a single "paid" checkbox — a real ledger. Deposits, milestones, the final balance. What's paid, what's outstanding.
- A way to close things. Mark a task done. Mark a project complete. Watch the finished work step out of the way so I can see what's still live.
That's it. That's the whole job. No sprints, no assignees, no story points, no "workspaces." Just: who owes me what, how much have they paid, and am I done?
So I built it
I built a small tool that does exactly that and nothing more. I want to be clear about what it isn't: it's not trying to compete with Asana, Toggl, Everhour, or any of the excellent products in this space. Those are wonderful tools for the teams they're made for.
This is just the opposite bet — small on purpose.
A few decisions I'm quietly proud of:
- Billing mode is implicit. Set an agreed fee and it's a fixed-price project — your tracked time becomes reference, not the bill. Leave the fee blank and it bills by the hour. Set the rate to €0 and it's non-billable — because sometimes the client is "Myself" and I still want to know how many hours my own website ate.
- Payments are a ledger, not a flag. A 30% deposit up front, a milestone halfway, the balance on delivery — the way freelance money actually moves. "Paid" and "outstanding" are just math on that ledger.
- Completion is gentle. Finish the last task and the app suggests marking the project done. It never does it behind your back. (And a fully-paid project can't be quietly reopened — because that's a mistake, not a workflow.)
No feature exists unless I actually hit the need for it. That constraint is the whole point.
The lesson
The best tool isn't the one with the most features. It's the one that disappears — the one you use without thinking, that gives you back the number you came for and gets out of the way.
For years I assumed that tool had to be bought. It turns out it just had to be honest about who it was for.
It's free. It's simple. It's actually useful — to me. And if you're a freelancer who's ever felt like a rounding error in software built for teams of fifty, maybe it's for you too.
Built by a freelancer, for freelancers. Not to disrupt anything — just to finally stop diagnosing my tools and get back to the work.
Repo link --> https://github.com/melasistema/clients-melasistema
