u/TimelyRepeat4517

In July I posted about 3 months, 40 downloads, and zero conversions. This is the follow-up.

The numbers today: 49 downloads, 5 App Store ratings with the score now publicly visible, still ranking first on "freelance" in the Mac App Store. Still zero Pro conversions.

The thread that post generated was the most useful product research I've done. 150+ comments from people who've shipped their own tools. A few things that solidified:

The paywall is in the wrong place. The feature users mention first is always time tracked flowing directly into an invoice. That's free. Pro unlocks Gantt, recurring invoices, iCloud sync, AI assistant, full reports. Several people in the thread made the same point: I described the core job and then put it in the free tier. The things behind Pro solve problems users haven't hit yet at month three.

I'm not touching the free tier. The consensus from the thread pushed toward usage-based gating over feature gating, project count or invoice count rather than hiding specific features. But with 49 downloads I don't have enough signal to make that call responsibly. September is the date I set to revisit it.

What I did ship instead. Windows version is launching next week on the Windows Store. Same local-first architecture, no cloud, no account. Paddle Billing for payments since Apple IAP isn't an option there.

The distribution insight that keeps proving true. Reddit comments in the right thread outperform launch posts every time. The HarvestApp sub just had a meltdown over a 700% price increase. One comment mentioning Flowara there generated more clicks than most posts I've written. The intent is already in the room.

What zero revenue actually means at this stage. I've stopped reading it as a pricing signal. 49 downloads is too small a sample. The retention is real, people are updating through multiple releases. The question I'm sitting with is whether the people who found it have gone through enough billing cycles to hit the ceiling. Most probably haven't.

Windows next week. September for the pricing review. Still building.

I build Flowara, a Mac app for freelancers. Three months in, 40 downloads, no marketing budget.

The last release shipped Gantt drag-to-reschedule, AI invoice reminders, iCloud sync, custom task statuses, and CSV import. None of those were on a roadmap six months ago. All of them came from a specific conversation with a specific person.

CSV import: a tester was breaking down project milestones in ChatGPT, then entering tasks one by one into Flowara. He sent me a screenshot of the dialog. "Entering this one by one for a hundred tasks is not viable." Shipped it in the next release.

iCloud sync: another tester said "I close my laptop at home and open my desktop at the office and I'm not going to remember to backup every time." Three words: "not going to remember." That's the whole design brief. Shipped it, then had to fix it twice because sandboxed SQLite sync has some brutal edge cases.

AI invoice reminders: ran a thread on Reddit asking how people handle late payments. 84 comments. The pattern that kept coming up wasn't "I need better wording" but "I hate having to decide whether to send another email." The feature isn't the email, it's removing the decision. Approve before send, nothing goes out without you seeing it first.

Custom task statuses: same tester who asked for CSV import, two messages later: "Could task status be customised?" One line. That's it.

The lesson I keep relearning: users don't ask for features, they describe friction. "Entering this one by one" is not a feature request, it's a problem statement. The feature is your job to figure out.

What's the most useful thing a user ever said to you, even if it didn't sound like feedback at the time?

In June I posted about getting banned from the community that was converting best and what that forced me to learn about distribution. This is the update.

The numbers today: 40 first-time downloads, 41 updates from existing users, 5 App Store ratings, note publicly visible, ranking first on "freelance" in the Mac App Store ahead of an app that's been there for 11 years. 599 product page views total, 2281 impressions.

Zero paying customers.

The updates number is the one I keep coming back to. 41 updates on 40 downloads means the people who installed are not only keeping the app, they're installing new versions. The retention is real.

But nobody has converted to Pro yet. Projects, tasks, time tracking, invoicing, estimates and expenses are all free forever. Pro unlocks Gantt, iCloud sync, proposals, recurring invoices, AI assistant, full reports. Apparently most freelancers can run their whole business without needing any of that, at least in the first 3 months.

Which raises the question I don't have a clean answer to yet: is the free tier too generous, or is 3 months just too early to see conversion on a tool people adopt slowly?

What I've learned from the users who stayed:

The feature that gets mentioned first is always the connection between time tracking and invoicing. Not the Gantt. Not the AI. Just the fact that hours tracked on a project flow directly into an invoice without copy-pasting. That's the job. Everything else is scaffolding.

CSV import came directly from a tester who was breaking down project milestones in ChatGPT and copying tasks one by one. Shipped it in the next release.

iCloud sync came from someone who said "I close my laptop at home and open my desktop at the office and I'm not going to remember to backup every time." Shipped it. Then had to fix it twice because edge cases in sandboxed apps are brutal.

The Windows version is built and waiting for the Windows Store deployment.

On distribution, Reddit comments still outperform launch posts. The post "How do you handle chasing clients for late payments" generated 84 comments and real product insights. A launch post generates views and silence.

The honest question I'm sitting with: at what point does zero revenue mean the free tier is wrong, versus the product just needs more time to earn its place in people's workflows?

I ship Flowara, a local-first Mac app for freelancers built on Electron with a SQLite database. No cloud backend, no account required. When users started asking for multi-Mac access, I needed iCloud sync without compromising the offline-first architecture.

The approach is deliberately simple: put the SQLite file inside iCloud Drive and let Apple's daemon sync it like any other document. No custom sync protocol. The hard parts are the sandboxing constraints and preventing two devices from writing concurrently.

The lock file

Two devices writing to the same SQLite file would corrupt it. The solution is a flowara.lock JSON file sitting next to the database in the same iCloud folder, containing hostname, pid, and timestamp.

On launch, the app reads the lock. If the timestamp is recent (under 90 seconds) and belongs to a different machine, the user sees "Flowara is already open on [hostname]" with the option to quit or take over. If the timestamp is older than 90 seconds, it's considered stale (crash or lost network) and the app clears it and continues.

Once past the check, the app writes its own lock and starts a heartbeat that refreshes the timestamp every 30 seconds. On quit, a WAL checkpoint runs first (important: iCloud only syncs the main .db file, a dangling WAL means the next device downloads a DB missing recent writes), then the lock file is deleted so other devices immediately see the database as available.

The 90-second staleness window is intentionally generous. It has to be longer than realistic iCloud sync propagation delay, otherwise a second device could see a live lock as stale simply because the heartbeat hasn't synced down yet.

The sandboxing problem

A sandboxed app can't touch arbitrary paths outside its container without explicit permission. When the user picks their iCloud folder via Settings, the app uses dialog.showOpenDialog with securityScopedBookmarks: true. The OS grants a security-scoped bookmark token for that folder.

The critical part: on every subsequent launch, the app must call app.startAccessingSecurityScopedResource(bookmark) to re-activate access. Sandboxed apps lose folder access between launches. This is exactly the step that broke in beta, the bookmark became invalid after a reboot, silently no-op'd, and everything that touched the iCloud folder failed downstream.

iCloud placeholder files

iCloud files can exist only as a placeholder (.icloud extension) if the real contents haven't downloaded yet. On launch, the app checks for this and calls brctl download, then polls for up to 30 seconds for the real file to materialize. If it never shows, the user gets a clear error dialog and the app quits rather than opening a stale or partial database.

Migration

Switching to iCloud mode backs up the current database to the new folder, copies the documents subfolder, saves the new config, then calls app.relaunch(). Everything re-initializes from the new location on the next launch rather than trying to hot-swap the database connection mid-session.

Documents (attached files) are stored as real files under a relative path, not as database blobs. That's what makes the whole folder portable: iCloud syncs it as a unit, and relative paths mean the absolute mount path doesn't matter on each machine.

Happy to answer questions on any of the specifics.

Building out the invoicing side of my app and stuck on this one.

Most tools just mark an invoice as overdue and stop there. Nothing automated, nothing helpful, you're back to manually writing an email you've already written a dozen times, trying to sound firm but not aggressive.

Curious how people actually handle this in practice. Do you send manual reminders, set a fixed schedule, escalate the tone after a certain number of days, or just let it slide until it gets uncomfortable.

Trying to figure out what's actually useful here versus what's just a feature nobody uses. If you've built something around this or have a system that works, would love to hear it.Building out the invoicing side of my app and stuck on this one.

Most tools just mark an invoice as overdue and stop there. Nothing automated, nothing helpful, you're back to manually writing an email you've already written a dozen times, trying to sound firm but not aggressive.

Curious how people actually handle this in practice. Do you send manual reminders, set a fixed schedule, escalate the tone after a certain number of days, or just let it slide until it gets uncomfortable.

Trying to figure out what's actually useful here versus what's just a feature nobody uses. If you've built something around this or have a system that works, would love to hear it.

Six weeks ago I started sharing a Mac app I built for freelancers. No audience, no budget, just the product and Reddit.

It worked, until I got a 100 day ban from the community that was converting best, for not having enough unrelated activity there before posting.

What that forced me to learn: most distribution advice assumes you pick one channel and scale it. In practice every community has its own unwritten rules, and the channel that works today can disappear overnight for reasons that have nothing to do with your product.

What's worked since: showing up in conversations where the problem already exists instead of creating new posts. Comment quality matters more than post frequency. A handful of real conversations beat a dozen generic launches.

What hasn't worked: LinkedIn, Product Hunt without an existing audience, posting the same thing in multiple places.

Curious how others have dealt with losing access to their best channel mid-momentum.

Most time trackers solve one problem well but create another: the data lives in isolation. 

You track hours in one app, then manually move them to your invoicing tool at the end of the month. Every time. 

When I built Flowara, I made time tracking and invoicing share the same database from day one. You log time on a task — it shows up automatically in the invoice. No export, no copy-paste. 

The dashboard shows unbilled hours across all projects in real time. "Select all & invoice" turns 111 unbilled hours into a draft invoice in one click. 

Mac only, local SQLite, no cloud, free tier available.

Happy to answer questions about the implementation — the natural language parsing ("2h on Website Redesign this morning") was an interesting technical challenge.

Built Flowara because I was tired of paying for 4 separate tools that didn't share data. Hours in one app, invoices in another, projects somewhere else. 

The core idea: when time tracking and invoicing share the same database, "how much is unbilled on this project" becomes a 10-second answer. 

• What's free forever: 
• Projects, tasks and Kanban
• Time tracking (with natural language input)
• Invoices and estimates
• Client management
• Reports overview

 

Pro unlocks PDF export, full reports, templates, backup and VAT auto-fill. 

100% local — SQLite, no cloud, no account required, works offline.

Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flowara-freelance-business/id6760207975

Happy to answer questions about the build.

https://preview.redd.it/67s7za09b13h1.png?width=2560&format=png&auto=webp&s=01936e5d5822293776caac13bd5500cb02f63ed9

Curious what other Mac users who freelance or work independently are actually using day to day. 

Not looking for the "best app" debate — more interested in how people actually combine tools in practice. 

For context, I'm a software developer who also does freelance work. I spent a long time juggling separate apps for projects, time tracking, and invoicing before consolidating everything. A few things I'm curious about: 

• Do you use one app or several for managing client work? 
• How do you track time — timer, manual, something else? 
• Invoicing — dedicated app, spreadsheet, or part of a bigger tool? 
• What's the one thing your current setup still doesn't do well?

 

No right answer — just genuinely curious how other Mac freelancers have figured this out.