Ship Counter
A weekly audit for solo creators that compares hours spent tweaking gear, dashboards, and workflows against hours spent shipping posts, videos, or product — with concrete prompts to cut the meta-work tax.
solo creators and indie hackers who keep procrastinating by optimizing their setup
- Auto-imported time tracking from your calendar, editing apps, and content tools
- A 'ship ratio' — minutes of shipped output vs minutes on tooling — compared to your past weeks
- Weekly prompts: which tool did you actually use this week, and which was a sunk cost?
- Anonymous peer benchmark so you see if your ratio is normal or extreme
Productivity content is a cottage industry but no tool directly audits the meta-work tax; the HN post's strong reception signals appetite for an antidote.
Indie hackers actively seek productivity tooling (multiple 2026 roundups, SoloTrack, toolindex lists), but the specific 'meta-work vs shipping' framing is niche rather than mass-market pain.Best Productivity for Indie Hackers 2026 - Solo Builder Picks ↗SoloTrack - Time Tracking for Solo Professionals ↗
Toggl, RescueTime, and SoloTrack cover generic time tracking, but none specifically audit 'setup tweaking vs shipping' or surface a meta-work tax with prompts to cut it — the specific wedge is open.RescueTime vs Toggl Track: Detailed Comparison (2026) ↗Best Free Todo Apps for Solo Founders & Indie Hackers ↗
Indie hackers are famously price-sensitive — Toggl's free tier and $9 Starter plan anchor expectations low; a weekly-audit product with AI prompts will struggle to command meaningful subscription revenue.Toggl Track Pricing ↗Toggl Track Pricing: All Plans, Costs & Hidden Fees Explained ↗
Productivity self-optimization is a perennial theme, but the 'weekly audit + prompts' format has historically driven mediocre retention; the underlying anxiety is durable but tool demand for it cycles.
MVP is buildable in weeks — OS-level time-tracking hooks, calendar/GitHub integrations, and an LLM prompt layer are all commodity components; no deep infra or compliance barriers.