Frequently asked questions

A macOS productivity tracker that measures your real output — Actions Per Minute and Focus Time — and, when you tell it to, actually stops you from drifting by closing distracting browser tabs and native apps mid-session.

Independent developers, writers, designers, students — anyone whose output is measurable in "actions taken today" and who's willing to trade a small amount of comfort for aggressive accountability. If passive time-tracking already does the job for you, you don't need this.

Two things: Actions Per Minute and Focus Time. Actions Per Minute is a density signal — how hard you're pushing right now. Focus Time is a duration signal — how many real minutes of work you got today. Together they answer "was this a productive session?" without a journal.

One Action = 1 mouse click OR 10 characters typed. The ratio keeps clicks and typing roughly equivalent in effort, so a coding session scores similarly to a design session. Actions Per Minute is Actions divided by the minute you spent doing them.

Any minute you spend actively interacting with your Mac — typing or clicking. Step away for a coffee and the timer pauses; sit back down and it resumes. You get credit for the minutes you put in, not the ones the clock ticked while your laptop sat there.

Any period where you're not interacting — no keyboard, no mouse. Sleep, going for a walk, reading something on paper. Idle doesn't count against your goals; it just doesn't count toward them.

Meetings are the honest exception to the "no input, no credit" rule. Maxxer keeps a list of presence apps — Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Webex, and a few others. When one of them is your foreground app you stay counted as active even without keystrokes. You can edit the list in Settings to add whatever your team uses.

The webcam is optional. It adds two signals on top of the input-based ones: are your eyes on-screen, and is a phone in your hand. Together they catch the two failure modes keystroke tracking misses — technically at the keyboard but zoned out, or scrolling on your phone with the Mac open in front of you. Everything runs locally through MediaPipe; frames never leave the device.

Keep the camera off and tracking still works — you just lose those two states.

You set a block list of apps and sites you don't want to be on during focus time — X, Instagram, YouTube, whatever your poison is. Open one of them and three things can happen depending on how you've configured it:

• The Assassin takes over the screen with a 5-second countdown, then closes the tab or quits the app.
• Grayscale mode strips the colors from the site, killing the pull of red notification dots and thumbnails without closing anything.
• Blitz — if you're inside a commitment block — runs the Assassin at full sensitivity and won't let you cancel out.

Mix and match as you like. The premise: willpower is expensive, and a 5-second automated intervention is cheap.

The moment you land on a blocked destination, a full-screen takeover appears with a 5-second countdown. When it hits zero Maxxer closes the tab or quits the app. Come back to the same destination inside the hour and the countdown gets shorter — the second attempt might be 3 seconds, the third might be immediate. A 5-minute cooldown after each kill keeps you out of a loop if the click was accidental.

A focus block you commit to before starting — you set the length and the reason. Once running, you can't cancel it without breaking the streak. During a Blitz the Assassin runs at full sensitivity: any blocked tab or app you open closes on a 5-second countdown, no exceptions. The friction is the feature — the moment you'd normally rationalize a break is the moment you get the work done.

A softer alternative to the Assassin. Instead of closing a blocked site, Maxxer strips the color out of it. Red notification dots, colored buttons, video thumbnails — everything washes to gray. Same information, none of the visual pull. It works on single-page apps like X and Reddit that other blockers struggle with.

Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, and Safari. All of them expose the AppleScript tab-management API Maxxer needs to close a distracting tab.

No. Firefox on macOS doesn't expose an AppleScript API for tab manipulation, so Maxxer can't close a Firefox tab the way it can with Chrome or Safari. You can still use Firefox as your everyday browser — Maxxer just can't kill tabs there. If you want the full Assassin experience, use a Chromium-based browser or Safari.

Yes. Any macOS app on your block list — X, Instagram, Slack, Discord — gets the same 5-second countdown when it comes to the foreground during focus time.

No. Maxxer counts keystrokes — how many keys you pressed and roughly when. It never records what those keys spell out. The Accessibility permission macOS asks for is what enables the count; we use it for count-only telemetry and nothing else.

Only aggregate metrics needed for the leaderboard and the encrypted backup, and only if you turn those on. Your raw activity — keystroke counts per app per minute, session boundaries, presence timelines — stays on your Mac in a local SQLite database. See our Privacy Policy for the full picture.

No. Maxxer never captures screen contents. It knows which app is in focus (Chrome vs. VS Code vs. Slack) and — for supported browsers — the domain of the active tab, but not what's on the page.

Never. All webcam analysis runs locally with MediaPipe. Frames are held in memory just long enough to compute one boolean per second (face on-screen? phone visible?), then discarded. No image, no thumbnail, no derived data ever hits the network.

14 days of full access, no card required. Around day 13 you'll see a scoped recap of what you tracked, then the plan picker. If you don't subscribe, the app switches to read-only. Your data stays intact if you come back later.

If you're not sure it'll click: weekly at $6.99. If you're committing to the habit: annually at $119.99 — about $10/month and 41% cheaper than paying monthly. Monthly at $16.99 sits in the middle for anyone who wants the flexibility to leave at the end of a billing period.

Any time, from your account settings. Upgrades are prorated; downgrades take effect at the end of the current billing period.

Email support@maxxer.app within 14 days of any charge and we refund it — no forms, no phone tree. Full details on the Refund page.

macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel. The install is a signed and notarized .dmg; auto-updates ship weekly.

• Accessibility — required. Counts keystrokes and detects window focus.
• Automation → Chrome / Safari / etc. — required for the Assassin to close browser tabs. Skip this and tab-killing is disabled, but keystroke and focus tracking still work.
• Camera — optional. Enables the on-phone and zoning-out signals. Everything runs locally; frames never leave the device.

We never ask for Full Disk Access, Screen Recording, Microphone, or Contacts.

Idle CPU is under 1% on an M-series Mac. Memory footprint is around 90–130 MB. With webcam attention tracking on, the ML pipeline is scheduled to yield to your typing and shuts down during sustained input, so it never fights you for battery. If you notice a slowdown, something's wrong — email us.