A menu-bar honesty meter for knowledge workers. Miniowl quietly watches your Mac and sorts your day into the categories that matter to you — so you see, at a glance, where the hours actually went.
macOS · Free during private beta · $5/mo at launch · Early users locked in
You log long weeks and still wonder why some of them feel hollow. The reason is almost never effort — it’s where the effort lands. Miniowl makes your week visible at a glance, in the categories that matter to you, before the retro, before it’s too late to course-correct.
Tiny Mac app. Lives in the menu bar. No tray notifications, no popups, no daily standup ritual. Two seconds of attention per check-in.
Front app, window title, browser host, active vs. away. Never the content. Every 20 minutes, an LLM groups it into the categories you defined — or sensible defaults if you haven’t.
Open the menu bar — there’s your day in stacked bars and one honest sentence. Open the dashboard — there’s your last 30 days. No reports to read, no charts to interpret.
Miniowl is local-first. Cloud sync is off when you install the app — nothing about your day leaves your Mac unless you turn it on yourself.
Miniowl is in design-partner mode — we’re making sure the category view actually changes how founders work, not just how their menu bar looks. While we’re here, the whole product is free. No card, no trial timer, no upsell modal.
Founding-user perk: if you join during the beta and give us honest feedback, your first 3 months of cloud sync stay free after we open to the public. Our way of saying thanks for the brutally honest feedback.
Install miniowl, work the way you always work, and check the menu bar at the end of the day. The number you see will not lie.
macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon & Intel · Open source on GitHub