About Timerr
My name is Mathias, and I'm the one who built Timerr.
Here's why. It's a story about a photographer, a Monday morning, and a lightbulb moment.
When Timerr started as an idea, it looked very different from the product you see today. I wanted to build a clip-card tool: a way to sell your hours to a client as a single prepaid package, where both sides could easily keep track of how many were left.
That was the idea I brought into Innovationshuset, the startup incubator at UCN in Aalborg. I was interning in my own company, surrounded by other founders who all wanted to try building something of their own.
One Monday morning I got talking with one of the others. She was a photographer, and as we swapped little stories about the weekend, she told me about a wedding she had shot.
She had been paid a sum that, to my student eyes, sounded like a lot of money for grinding through a whole weekend. It was an important milestone in her career. The price had been agreed up front with the happy couple, who wanted plenty of photos from the day. But she also mentioned the two extra rounds of edits they wanted, more photos from the party than first agreed, and an email thread that was still running that Monday morning.
I did a bit of math in my head and then asked her how many hours she actually thought she'd spent on the project.
"I honestly don't know," she said.
And I could only nod in recognition. Because how do you log fifteen minutes here and half an hour there while you're in the middle of it?
We tried to put some rough estimates on it anyway. The travel, the editing, the extra rounds of requested photos, the emails back and forth. Then we worked out her real hourly rate. It had plummeted compared to what she'd thought. The big sum for the project suddenly looked very, very small held up against all the hours.
A lightbulb went on over my head.
Why isn't there a business tool for freelancers that helps with exactly this? Since then I've learned it's a problem a lot of people know, but almost no one can see while they're in the thick of it.
That's why Timerr exists
Timerr works out your effective hourly rate (what you earn on the billable hours) and your real hourly rate (the same earnings spread across all your time, including travel, emails, and revisions). The difference is often 30-40%, and it stays invisible until someone works it out for you.
That's the whole idea: make your invisible work visible, so you can make better decisions about pricing, scope, and which clients are actually worth saying yes to.
The journey
That lightbulb never really switched off. From that moment, Timerr wasn't a side project anymore, it was the center of everything I did. The rest of my studies, first computer science and then a bachelor's in web development at UCN, I angled toward Timerr, whether it was school projects, exam assignments (when I was allowed), internships, or networking.
Along the way I even brought on a couple of interns, and together we spent hours talking with freelancers about their everyday work, their projects, and the places where it hurt. That's where it really sank in how common the problem was, and that I hadn't just made it up in my own head.
In June 2023 I stood at Børsen in Copenhagen at the Danish national entrepreneurship championship. An early version of Timerr received a 25,000 kr grant from the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship. It wasn't the money that mattered most, it was the confirmation that I was on the right track.
Since then I've rebuilt Timerr from the ground up more than once. Versions have been scrapped, ideas tried and dropped, and each time the product got sharper.
What you see today is the result of several years of work with one goal:
To make your invisible work visible.
Want to see your own real hourly rate?
Try Timerr for free, or click around a live demo first. No commitment.