About FaceClock

About FaceClock

FaceClock started with a small problem.

A friend ran a print shop with twelve people. He’d tried three time-tracking apps in two years. The first one was fine until the cafe Wi-Fi dropped for an afternoon and nobody could clock in. The second one stopped letting him export to CSV unless he upgraded to a $24-per-user plan. The third one wanted to upload employees’ face photos to a server “for backup purposes” — and one of his employees, who’d worked through the BIPA lawsuits in Illinois, refused.

So we built the thing he actually wanted: a clock that lives on a single phone mounted by the door, recognizes faces locally, and never sends anything anywhere.

What FaceClock is, in one paragraph

It’s a free Android app. You install it on a phone or tablet, mount it near the entrance, register your team (three reference photos each, takes about thirty seconds per person), and walk away. Employees clock in by looking at the camera. Shifts log automatically. When payroll comes around, you export a CSV. That’s the whole product.

What it isn’t

  • Not a SaaS product. There is no account.
  • Not a project tracker — it doesn’t care what people did during their shift.
  • Not a surveillance tool. It logs the moment of clock-in and clock-out, not what happened in between.
  • Not free of trade-offs. It runs on a single device, which means that device is the system. If it falls off the wall, you lose the day.

Who tends to use it

Cafes, restaurants, small workshops, dental clinics, salons, language schools, microbreweries, and the kind of office that has between three and forty people. Mostly places where the alternative is a paper sign-in sheet or a shared spreadsheet.

We get the occasional larger team that uses it as a per-location time clock that syncs CSVs centrally — that works too, just less elegantly.

The economics, briefly

FaceClock is free. The source is on GitHub under Apache-2.0. There’s no premium tier, no enterprise upsell, no hosted version we sell separately. If the project ever grows enough to need full-time funding, we’ll write that conversation up clearly first. Right now it’s maintained part-time by people who use it themselves.

Where to find us