# Founder Q&A

*Answers are drawn from Added Time's documented design decisions and from the founder's note
published on addedtime.app. Mathias is available for interview and for follow-up questions:
**support@addedtime.app**.*

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### Why is it called "Added Time"?

It's the football term. When play stops — an injury, a substitution — the referee doesn't
pretend those minutes happened; they get added on at the end. That is exactly the honest thing
to do with a paused study session. You get up, you drift, someone knocks at the door. Every
other timer treats that pause as free, and quietly turns your hour into a lie. Added Time holds
the main clock, runs a second one in orange, and gives the goal back the minutes it didn't get.

A paused minute wasn't a minute toward the goal. So it's added on until the goal has its full
measure. The whole app is downstream of that one idea.

### Why no analytics? Isn't that hard to run a business on?

There are no analytics because there is nowhere to send them. No account, no server, no SDK
from anyone else — the app has no third-party dependencies at all. That's not a policy I could
quietly change my mind about later; it's how the thing is built.

It is harder. I find out how the app is doing the way anyone did before tracking was cheap:
App Store Connect's own dashboards, and what people write to me. What I get in exchange is
being able to say something most apps in this category can't say at all — I don't know what
you study, when you study, or which apps you chose. Not "we don't look." From 1.0.1, when iCloud
is on, there's a copy, in your own iCloud, and I can't see it.

The website counts visits with its host’s own tools (no cookies, no ads, nothing to consent to), and
says so on the privacy page.

### Why is the ledger free? That's the whole product.

Because it's your record, and charging rent on your own record is the wrong shape. The Record —
every hour you've banked since your first block, per subject, with your focus ratio and your
clean sheets — is free on every tier. The payoff screen isn't the paid one. You can export the
entire thing to a spreadsheet without paying, which is the literal proof of "your record is
yours."

There's a commercial argument too, and I'd rather say it out loud than pretend to be a saint:
an app that holds your history hostage is an app you resent. I would rather you stay because
the count is worth watching.

### So what am I paying for?

The part that works on the days you never open the app. One standing window — a recurring
period when the apps you chose step aside — is free forever. The full week is Plus, along with
daily limits and screen-time goals with step-down coaching, and the doorman's ledger
that writes down what it held.

Worth being precise, because it's easy to overstate: a window hides apps on a schedule. It does
not start focus for you. Starting a block is always your act — the app never claims otherwise.

### What happens if I stop paying?

Nothing is deleted. Ever. The extra windows, the limits and the goals stop being enforced and
sit in your Week as resting rows — resubscribe and they pick up exactly where they were. Your
subjects, tallies, streaks and history are untouched either way, and the free tier keeps working
in full.

One detail I'm proud of: if you'd turned on the firmer way of leaving a window, lapsing puts it
back to the ordinary five-second hold. A lapsed subscriber never faces a *harder* exit than a
free user does. Making the door heavier for someone who stopped paying would be a small piece
of coercion, and it's exactly the kind of thing this app is supposed to refuse.

There's also no win-back campaign, because there's no email address to send one to.

### Why iPhone only?

Added Time is an iPhone app — iOS 18 or later, iPhone only. There's no iPad build and no Mac
build. An iPad version would be a genuinely different design rather than a stretched one, and
that isn't part of 1.0. I'm not putting a date on it.

### Isn't this just another app blocker?

The blocking is real and it's the paid half, but it's the supporting act. Every app in this
category is built around a number going *down* — screen time, opens, pickups. Added Time is
built around a number going *up*: hours toward an exam, a degree, an instrument, a sport. Screen
time falling is a side effect. The hours going somewhere is the product.

Which is also why it works for people the category ignores completely. Musicians, athletes,
pilots and language learners all keep hours. Nobody is selling them a focus app, because
"stop scrolling" isn't their problem.

### What's the one thing you'd want written down?

That nothing in it is designed to make you feel bad. Days active is a total, never a run — so
there's no streak to break and a Tuesday off costs you nothing. Counts are of what you kept.
A subject you finish keeps its line and its hours. Nothing turns red.

The list of things it will never do is published, and it's the page I'd most like quoted:
`the-refusals.md`.