About CleanStopwatch

I'm a solo developer. I built CleanStopwatch because every online timer I tried was either covered in tracking scripts, required signing up for an account, or looked outdated. I wanted something that just worked — zero friction, zero bloat.

There is no team, no VC funding, and no marketing budget here. I write all the code, respond to support emails personally, and pay the hosting bills out of pocket. It is a one-person operation with a big focus on quality.

Every feature, from the drift-corrected timer engine to the 54 themes, is designed and built by hand. No templates, no frameworks copied from tutorials — just deliberate engineering for a tool that needs to be reliable.

I don't collect your data, track your history, or log what you are timing. Your configuration and presets are saved locally on your own machine in localStorage. Nothing is sent to a server unless you explicitly choose to sync presets via your Pro license key.

The site uses third-party advertising (Google AdSense) to cover hosting costs, which may place cookies in accordance with their privacy policy. Aside from that, there are zero tracking scripts, no analytics spyware, and no fingerprinting. Privacy is not a feature toggle here — it is the foundation of the product.

Teachers projecting a countdown on a smartboard for exams or reading blocks. Streamers adding clean overlays to OBS for speedruns or live coding sessions. Students managing Pomodoro study blocks and deep work sessions. Developers timing sprints, standups, or build processes.

It is also used by event organizers for presentation countdowns, by fitness coaches for interval and HIIT timing, and by kitchen cooks tracking recipe steps. The configurator makes it easy to create an embed that matches any workflow or visual style.

The core stopwatch, timers, countdowns, and 17 basic themes are free forever. I offer a paid Pro upgrade that unlocks 37 premium themes, 15 premium alarm sounds, 9 advanced progress indicators, custom accent colors and fonts, ad removal, and preset syncing across devices via your license key.

This sustainable, direct-support model pays for the servers, the Polar.sh license verification infrastructure, the custom domain worker, and ongoing development time without resorting to selling user data or blocking essential timing features. Pro is not about gating functionality — it is about supporting continued development.

Most online timers fall into one of two categories: lightweight but ugly, or feature-rich but bloated with trackers and sign-up walls. CleanStopwatch aims for a third path — genuinely useful features wrapped in a design that respects your attention.

The timer engine uses a drift-corrected requestAnimationFrame loop that stays accurate regardless of browser throttling or tab backgrounding. The 21 alarm sounds are synthesized via the Web Audio API — zero audio files to load. All themes are pure CSS with canvas-based background animations that pause when the tab is hidden to save battery.

The embed configurator generates lightweight iframe snippets that load in under a second on a fast connection. The entire timer app ships as roughly 100KB of inline JavaScript with no external runtime dependencies.