A browser extension that only ever learns which domain you were on
Installing a time-tracking extension is a real decision, and most of them do not deserve the yes. This one exists for a single narrow reason: when the desktop tracker records forty minutes of “Chrome”, that is a useless label, and knowing the forty minutes were on your client’s Jira makes the difference between an entry that sorts itself and one you have to sort by hand. Domains are enough for that. So domains are all it takes.
Manifest V3 · domains only · URLs and titles opt-in
What does it actually capture?
The domain, and the clock
github.com, and the seconds you were on it. Not the path, not the query string, not the fragment. The hostname is lowercased and everything after it is thrown away before the segment is even written down.
No ability to read a page
The extension ships no content scripts and asks for no host permission on any site you visit. It physically cannot see text, forms, keystrokes, screenshots or anything else on a page — the capability is absent, not merely unused.
Only the tab in front of you
The active tab of the focused window, and only while you are actually at the machine. After a minute of no input the open stretch is closed and capture stops until you come back.
Nothing under five seconds
A tab you passed through on the way somewhere else is not a fact worth keeping, so short stretches are discarded on your machine and never reach the network.
Anything that is not an ordinary web page is invisible to it. Browser settings pages, local files, other extensions’ pages and internal URLs produce no segment at all, because the capture starts by asking whether the address is http or https and gives up if it is not.
The permissions it asks Chrome for
Four, and you can check them on the store listing before you install: tabs, storage, alarms and idle. The host permissions list two entries and both are BillNotch’s own API: https://api.billnotch.com/* and http://localhost:3001/*, the second only so a developer can point a local build at a local server. Not one site you browse is in that list. There is no <all_urls>, no scripting, no activeTab and no content script anywhere in the bundle.
That combination is the whole privacy argument, and it is checkable rather than promised: an extension with no host access to the sites you visit cannot read them, whatever its description says. If you turn on URL or title capture in the popup, it starts sending the full URL and the tab title — which is a much larger thing to consent to, which is why it is two separate switches you have to find.
How you install and connect it
Install it from the Chrome Web Store and pin it. In BillNotch, the connect card generates a personal API key — the same kind the desktop app uses, prefixed tt_, issued by you and revocable by you. Paste it into the extension popup and press Test: it will tell you which workspace it reached, or say plainly that the key works but the workspace is locked, which is the failure people otherwise spend an afternoon on.
Settings then shows what has actually arrived — segments, total seconds and your top domains over the last day — so you can confirm it is working without taking anyone’s word for it. Every member connects their own key; nobody sees anybody else’s browsing, and no admin has to approve it.
What happens to a domain once it arrives
One thing, and it is worth being precise about it. When BillNotch is about to categorize a stretch of tracked time that has no project yet, it looks for browsing that overlapped that exact window, adds up the overlapping seconds per domain, keeps the top three, and hands them to the categorizer as hints alongside the activity itself. That is the entire use.
It does not appear in reports, on invoices, in analytics, on the leaks screen or in a CSV export. It is not a productivity score and nobody is ranked by it. If the lookup fails for any reason the categorization simply runs without the hints, because an enrichment that can break the thing it enriches is not worth having.
Uploads are batched roughly once a minute, deduplicated by an identifier derived from the domain and the exact timestamps, and queued locally when the network is gone — up to a few thousand stretches, oldest dropped first. Segments are kept for as long as your account exists; deleting the account or the workspace deletes them with it.
What it will not do
It is not a tracker. It creates no time entries, so with the extension installed and nothing else you would have zero tracked hours and nothing to bill. It cannot replace the desktop app, which is the thing that actually records your work; it makes that record easier to sort.
It also does not block sites, score your focus, categorize domains as productive or distracting, or notify anyone about anything. And it is Chrome and its relatives only — Firefox and Safari have no build, and the API address is fixed when the extension is built, so a self-hosted deployment would need its own.
Common questions
- Does it record the pages I visit?
- Not by default. It records the domain of the active tab and how long you were there. Full URLs and tab titles each have their own switch in the extension popup, both off until you turn them on, and with them off those fields are not merely blanked — they are absent from the request entirely.
- Does it work in incognito?
- No, unless you go out of your way. The extension declares no incognito access, so Chrome disables it in private windows until you explicitly allow it in the extensions page.
- Can it track my time without the desktop app?
- No. It never creates a time entry. Its data exists only to improve how existing untracked entries get sorted into projects, so on its own it produces nothing you can bill or report on.
- Which browsers can install it?
- Chrome and Chromium browsers — Edge, Brave, Arc — from the Chrome Web Store. It is a Manifest V3 extension. There is no Firefox or Safari build.
Add it once the tracking is already running
Start with a 14-day trial and the desktop app; the extension is worth adding the first time a browser-heavy afternoon lands on the Review screen with no project on it. How the capture works explains the part that does the tracking, the privacy policy states the same limits in binding language, tracking without screenshots covers the same promise across the whole product, and calendar sync covers the hours that happen away from the screen entirely.
Start tracking free