In short
- No account. Nothing to sign up for, no email required to use the app.
- No telemetry. No analytics, crash pings or usage reporting.
- One network moment. A one-time license activation. The break system itself never needs a connection.
Why this matters for a break app specifically
A tool that watches when you work is, by construction, watching you. The category norm is to send that signal somewhere: a cloud account, a productivity score, an activity feed, sometimes a manager's dashboard. Those products offer something real in exchange — automatic categorisation, cross-device history, team insight — and for some people that trade is worth it.
StopBurnout makes the opposite trade. It offers none of that, so it needs none of your data. There is no analytics pipeline to leak, no account to breach, no retention policy to trust and no acquisition that could change the terms later. The privacy claim is structural rather than a promise about our future good behaviour.
What it reads, precisely
Windows exposes how long ago the last keyboard or mouse input event occurred. That single number is the entire input to the timer. StopBurnout does not:
- capture keystrokes or their content;
- read window titles;
- record which applications you use;
- log websites, URLs or browser activity;
- take screenshots or webcam images;
- track location, or your identity in any form.
Those absences are not settings you have to find and switch off. The features that would require them do not exist in the product. More on how the timer uses that one value is on the activity-based timer page.
What it stores, and where
Your settings, session state, daily and weekly break history, the 24-hour timeline and the local log of early unlocks are written to a SQLite database file on your own disk, updated every second so a reboot or crash cannot lose the session.
Because it is an ordinary file, you own the lifecycle: back it up, copy it to another machine, or delete it. Deleting it removes the history permanently — there is no server-side copy to also request the removal of.
Breaks that don't need to know who you are
Enforced full-screen breaks on every monitor, no account, no telemetry, no cloud. Free for 14 days.
The one time the network is used
Activating a purchased license is a one-time exchange with our server. That is the only network interaction in the product, and after it completes the app runs fully offline — including on a machine that is permanently disconnected, apart from that initial activation. The 14-day trial is the complete app with no functional limitations.
Our privacy policy covers what happens on the website side, where a consent-gated analytics tag does run. The website and the desktop app are separate: declining cookies on this page has no effect on the app, because the app was never reporting anything in the first place.
How this compares
| Data question | Cloud productivity suites | StopBurnout |
|---|---|---|
| Account required | Yes, typically | No |
| Activity metadata collected | Apps, sites, window titles | Time since last input only |
| Where history lives | Provider's servers | A file on your disk |
| Works with no internet | Usually degraded | Fully, after activation |
| Cross-device history | Yes | No — single machine |
| Automatic categorisation and insights | Yes | No |
The bottom two rows are the real cost of this design, and they are not small. If you want your work history to follow you between machines or to be analysed for patterns, a local-only tool is the wrong choice and you should pick one of the cloud products instead.
Common questions
Does StopBurnout work offline?
Yes. The break system needs no network at all. The only network moment is the one-time license activation.
Do I need to create an account?
No. There is no sign-up and no cloud profile. Settings and history exist only on the machine you installed it on.
What data does it collect?
How long ago your last keyboard or mouse input occurred. No keystrokes, window titles, application names, websites or screenshots, and no analytics or telemetry.
Where is my break history stored?
In a SQLite file on your own disk. Back it up or delete it yourself; deleting it removes the history permanently.
Can my employer see my break data?
Not through StopBurnout — there is no dashboard, team view or reporting endpoint to log into. Anyone with administrative access to the machine itself can of course read files stored on it.
Is it open source?
No. StopBurnout is closed-source commercial software. If verifiable source code is your requirement, Stretchly and Workrave are the honest recommendations.