Show the work,
close the tab.

The timer isn't the product. Getting paid is.

Freelancers lose money in four places. They forget to start the timer and guess later, which means billing less. Clients doubt the hours, because off a marketplace a timesheet is just your word. Invoicing eats an evening. And then they chase the payment.

Every tool I looked at did one of those jobs and stopped. Time trackers stop at a PDF. Billing tools cap their free tiers. Marketplaces protect your hours, but by taking screenshots of your screen. tab was designed to cover all four, for one person, without the surveillance.

Show the money, not just the minutes

The running clock shows dollars first: what this client owes you right now, ticking up as you work. Seeing the money keeps you honest about starting it. Switching clients hands over at the same second, so there are no gaps and no overlaps.

My own first real use changed it. Stopping the clock dropped the number to $0.00 even on the same client, and it felt like starting over. For a product called tab, the number should be the tab. Now the meter shows everything that client hasn't been billed for yet, and it never dips.

The client sees the work, not your screen

Upwork proved what freelancers really want: evidence of work that turns into payment. But it gets there by watching people. tab proves work with outputs instead. Each week's receipt lists every entry with its note and links to the real thing: the design file, the commit, the doc. The client taps "Looks right" or asks about a specific day, so questions come up on Friday, not a month after the invoice.

Later came the live tab: one private link per client that shows, read-only, whether the clock is running for them, what's been done since the last invoice, and what's waiting to be paid. It replaces the "how's it going?" email.

Easy to use. Easier to fix.

Visitors were reading the pages and leaving before they ever typed an email. So the first change was to let anyone try the real app with no account for seven days, and keep everything if they add an email later.

The next was setup itself. A trial that landed on "Let's get you paid: your name, your business name" was being abandoned on that screen. Now a trial opens on the clock: who's it for, what's the rate, Start. Your name waits until your first invoice. A full UX audit of tab, five journeys on phone and desktop, followed and found 11 problems; all of them were fixed, including the rule that each screen has exactly one solid button.

Ink, paper and one live orange

Inside the product, tab stays quiet: ink on paper, a pixel-style clock face, and orange that means one thing only, the timer is running. If something is orange, money is being earned.

Outside, in marketing, the mark gets loud. The four-colour stacked wordmark, blue to teal to yellow with orange always in front, carries the posters, ads and social art, so the energy lives where people are deciding, and the calm lives where they work.

Built in public, changed by real use

tab went from a strategy document to a public beta with live payments, and every change since has been written down with the reason behind it: more than seventy decisions so far, each one short enough to read in a minute.