Drifty Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

Drifty is an automatic Mac time tracker that records your apps and sites in three-minute blocks and uses AI to label each one Focus, Neutral or Drift with no manual tagging. Tracking is free forever and the AI classification runs locally if you want it to. Best for: privacy-conscious solo makers. Price: Free, or $5/mo for cloud AI. Rating: 7.5/10.

What is Drifty?

Drifty is a Mac app that answers one question: where did the day go. It sits in the background, records which app and which site had your attention in three-minute blocks, and then classifies each block as Focus, Neutral or Drift. You never start a timer and you never tag anything. At the end of the day you get a timeline showing exactly where the attention leaked.

It launched on Product Hunt on 25 July 2026 with the tagline “bring visibility to your focus,” and the interesting design decision is where the AI runs. Most tools in this space either do crude category matching against a hardcoded app list, or ship everything to a vendor’s cloud. Drifty gives you three options: its own cloud, your own OpenRouter key, or a model running locally on your Mac. Local mode means nothing about your workday leaves the machine.

The second decision that matters: there is no screen recording and no saved screenshots. Competitors like Rize and Timing have gone the other way, capturing more context to classify better. Drifty deliberately caps what it collects, and then uses a language model to make sense of the thinner signal instead.

What Are Drifty’s Key Features?

Automatic capture in three-minute blocks

Drifty records the active app, the site and the session context every three minutes with no input from you. No timers to start, no projects to select, no end-of-day reconciliation. This is the entire reason automatic trackers beat manual ones: the data is complete because you cannot forget to log it.

Three minutes is a sensible resolution. Fine enough to catch a real context switch, coarse enough that the timeline is readable rather than a wall of 15-second slivers. Capture keeps working offline, which matters more than it sounds, because the failure mode of a lot of tracking tools is a silent gap in the data when the wifi drops.

AI labels activity as Focus, Neutral or Drift

The classification layer is what separates this from a raw activity log. Drifty routes captured activity through fast models, currently Gemini Flash, DeepSeek V4 Flash and Qwen 3.6 27B, and labels each block without asking you to define rules. It also reads detail within an app rather than just the app name, so an hour in a browser can come back as focused research or as drift depending on what you were actually reading.

That within-app understanding is the feature most competitors get wrong. A tracker that scores “Chrome” as productive or unproductive is useless to anyone whose job lives in a browser, which is most people reading this. Drifty gets that right.

Run the AI locally, in the cloud, or with your own key

Local classification runs on your Mac and needs roughly 5 to 7 GB of RAM. Nothing leaves the device. If you would rather not give up the memory, Drifty Cloud handles it for $5 a month, or you point it at your own OpenRouter key and pay the models directly at roughly $4 to $6 a month of usage.

Three options for the same job is unusual, and it is the right call for a product whose entire dataset is a minute-by-minute log of what you do all day. Anyone who has hesitated to install a time tracker for exactly that reason now has a version they can say yes to.

Drift Alarm and pattern insights

When Drifty detects that you have drifted, it can alert you and offer a fast route back to what you were doing. This is the one feature we would want to test over a longer period, because interruption-based nudges are hit or miss and the difference between helpful and irritating is a few seconds of timing.

The reporting side is stronger: daily timelines, weekly calendars, focus and drift rhythms, and recurring pattern detection. Finding out that your drift reliably starts at 3pm on Tuesdays is the kind of thing that actually changes behaviour, and you cannot get it from a manual tracker because nobody logs their own procrastination honestly.

No screen recording and no saved screenshots

Drifty does not take screenshots and does not record your screen. That is a deliberate ceiling on how much it can know, and the team chose it over the more common approach of capturing everything and promising to keep it safe. What gets stored is app, site and session context, which is enough for a language model to reason about and thin enough that a leak would be embarrassing rather than catastrophic.

It is also the reason the local mode is viable at all. Classifying text metadata on-device is a job a 27B model can do on a laptop. Classifying a stream of screenshots is not. The privacy stance and the local-first architecture are the same decision viewed from two angles, and it is the most coherent thing about the product.

How Much Does Drifty Cost?

Full automatic tracking and capture costs $0 per month. Only the AI classification is paid, and even that has a free path: run the model locally on your Mac and pay nothing at all. Drifty Cloud is $5 per month for managed classification with no setup. Bring your own OpenRouter key and you pay the models directly, which the site estimates at $4 to $6 per month.

That undercuts the category by a lot. RescueTime Premium is $12 per month. Rize is $16.99 per month. Timing starts around $9 per month billed annually. Drifty’s most expensive tier is $5, and its free tier is more capable than most free tiers in this space because capture is unrestricted. The pricing works because Drifty is not paying for cloud storage of your data. It is a local-first app charging for optional inference, and that is a structurally cheaper business.

Who is Drifty Best For?

Use Drifty if you work on a Mac and you have wondered where four hours went. Use it if privacy is what has stopped you installing a tracker before, because local mode genuinely means the data stays on your machine. Use it if you have tried manual time tracking and abandoned it, which is nearly everyone. And use it if you want the insight without a subscription, because free capture plus local AI is a real product and not a crippled trial.

Skip Drifty if you are not on a Mac, because that is the only platform and there is no sign of Windows or Linux. Skip it if you need billable-hours tracking for clients, because this is an attention tool and not a timesheet: there is no invoicing, no project rate, no client export mentioned. Skip it if you manage a team and want visibility across people, because this is a single-user app by design. And skip local mode if your Mac has 8 GB of RAM, since giving up 5 to 7 GB to a classifier will hurt more than the insight helps.

Best Drifty Alternatives

Rize ($16.99/mo) is the closest in intent: automatic tracking with AI categorization, focus scoring and break reminders. More polished and more mature, with better session analytics. Three times the price, and your activity data goes to their cloud with no local option.

RescueTime ($12/mo Premium, free tier available) is the veteran. Cross-platform, well established, strong long-term reporting. Its weakness is exactly what Drifty fixes: category scoring is rule-based per app and it handles browser-heavy work poorly.

Timing (from around $9/mo annually) is the Mac power-user pick, especially if you need to turn tracked time into client invoices. Better for freelancers billing hours. Worse if what you want is a judgement about whether the time was well spent, which is Drifty’s whole point.

Final Verdict: Is Drifty Worth It?

Drifty gets the two hardest calls right. Automatic capture means the data is actually complete, and running classification inside the app rather than on a category list means the labels apply to browser work, which is where most knowledge work happens. Charging $5 at most, with a free local path, makes the usual objection to time trackers, that they cost more than the insight is worth, disappear. If you are a solo maker on a Mac, install it and look at one week of timeline before you decide anything.

What holds it back is scope and youth. Mac only, single user only, no billing features, and no named team behind it on the site, which is worth knowing before you let something log every app you touch for a year. The Drift Alarm is the feature most likely to end up switched off. But as a “where did my day go” tool it is the best-priced honest answer we have seen, and the local-AI option removes the one real reason not to try it. 7.5/10.