Privacy Policy

The short version

• You can use Pomodo’s timer and sounds without an account. Your settings, tasks and sound mixes live only in your browser until you sign in.
• Signing in lets you keep your focus history, tasks, settings and saved mixes on our server, across devices.
• We use PostHog and Google Analytics to see how the product is used. We do not record what you type — task names, mix names, and the “Working on” field never leave your device in analytics.
• We don’t sell your data. We don’t run ads. There is no payment system live yet, so we don’t hold any payment information.
• A public leaderboard can show your completed focus time under a name you choose — never your email, real name or account username, unless you deliberately set your leaderboard name to something identifying. You can hide yourself from it at any time.

1. Who runs Pomodo

Pomodo (getpomodo.com) is an independent project run by its developer. For anything in this policy, contact:

• Email: privacy@getpomodo.com
• In-app: the feedback form (available to signed-in users inside the app)

2. Account data

If you create an account, we store:

• Email address — required, used to sign in and to send password-reset links.
• Full name — required at signup (email accounts); for Google sign-in, we take your first and last name from your Google profile if Google provides them.
• Username — required, shown in a few places in the product; for Google sign-in this is generated automatically from your email address unless you change it.
• Password — only if you sign up with email. We never store your actual password: it is hashed (bcrypt) before it touches our database, and the hash cannot be reversed back into your password.
• Google account — if you sign in with Google, we receive your email address, first name, and last name from Google. We do not request or store your Google profile photo, and we never see your Google password.
• Refresh tokens — a device-specific credential that keeps you signed in. These are stored server-side and expire automatically after 30 days of being unused, or sooner if you sign out or change your password.

We send you an email in two situations: a password-reset link if you ask for one (the request itself doesn’t confirm or deny that an account exists), and nothing else automatically today — Pomodo doesn’t send marketing or digest emails.

3. What signing in lets us store

Once you’re signed in, the following is stored on our server, tied to your account:

• Focus sessions — when a focus, short-break or long-break session started, its length, how long you actually spent in it, and whether it was completed, paused, cancelled or abandoned. This is what your focus history, streaks and (if you’re signed in) the leaderboard are built from.
• Tasks and the “Working on” label — the task text you type is stored server-side once you’re signed in (that’s how tasks follow you across devices), along with status, priority, due date, subtasks and similar fields. This is separate from analytics, where task text is never sent — see Section 4.
• Settings — timer lengths, alarm choice, auto-start preferences, notification preferences, accessibility toggles and your daily/weekly goal.
• Saved sound mixes — the sounds and volumes you save as a preset, and the mix’s name if you gave it one. If you publish a mix publicly (via Discover), its name and sound composition become visible to anyone with the link.
• Feedback you submit — the bug report or feature request text you type into the feedback form, tied to your account.
• Achievements and stats — streaks, totals and similar figures are computed from your focus session history each time they’re shown; nothing extra is stored for them.

If you use Pomodo without signing in (as a guest): your tasks, settings, active sounds and sound preferences are kept only in your browser’s local storage. None of this reaches our server. If you later sign in on that same device, anything still sitting in local storage is copied into your new account (so you don’t lose it); nothing is copied if you never sign in.

4. Analytics

We use two analytics tools to understand how Pomodo is used. Neither is used for advertising, and neither records anything you type.

PostHog. Loaded on getpomodo.com only (never on localhost or a preview build) and sent through our own /ingest address rather than directly to PostHog’s servers. It records product actions — for example, that a focus session started or completed, that a sound was turned on, that a settings drawer was opened — along with simple categories and counts (a mode, a duration in minutes, a boolean, an enum value). It never receives text you typed: not your task names, not the names you give sound mixes, not anything in the “Working on” field. If you’re signed in, PostHog links your events to an internal account ID only — never your email, name or username. If you’re signed out, your events are anonymous and are not linked to any person. Session replay (recording what happens on your screen) is switched off at the source and has never been enabled. PostHog uses your browser’s local storage and a cookie to remember an anonymous device identifier between visits, the way most analytics tools do.

Google Analytics (GA4). Loaded when configured, using Google’s own script and cookies (for example _ga), covering page views and standard GA behaviour. We don’t have a custom configuration for it beyond turning it on; it behaves the way Google Analytics does on any site that loads it, and is covered by Google’s own privacy policy.

Error monitoring. If something in the app crashes, we may record the error message and a stack trace so we can fix it. This can only contain text we, as developers, wrote into the code (error messages) — never text you typed into a field.

5. The leaderboard

Pomodo has a leaderboard that ranks completed focus time.

• What’s ranked: only completed focus (work) sessions from signed-in users who haven’t hidden themselves (see below). Guests are never ranked, and nothing about a guest’s usage is shown to anyone else.
• Who can see it: anyone — including visitors who aren’t signed in — can see today’s and this week’s rankings. Signed-in users can also see this month. Longer ranges (this year, all time) are a paid feature once payments exist.
• What name is shown: never your email, your real name, or an automatically generated username. The leaderboard shows a name you deliberately chose for it (“leaderboard name”), or, if you haven’t set one, a neutral handle like “Focuser 4f2a” that reveals nothing about you.
• Hiding yourself: a “Show me on the leaderboard” setting controls this. Turning it off removes you from the leaderboard immediately; your focus history and streaks are unaffected — only the leaderboard stops showing you.
• Guests: if you’re signed out, you can see where you would rank based on sessions logged only in your own browser. This never changes what anyone else sees and is never sent to us.

6. Cookies and local storage, in plain terms

Pomodo doesn’t use cookies for advertising or tracking you across other sites. What is stored in your browser:

• Sign-in tokens (local storage) — so you stay signed in between visits.
• Guest data (local storage) — tasks, settings and sound preferences you set before signing in.
• Analytics identifiers (local storage / cookie, PostHog; cookies, Google Analytics) — anonymous identifiers used to group your visits together, as described in Section 4.
• A couple of small local-storage flags that remember which one-time celebrations or achievement toasts you’ve already seen, so they don’t repeat.

You can clear any of this at any time through your browser’s settings. For a signed-in account, clearing local storage signs you out of that browser but does not delete your account or its data on our server.

7. Who else sees your data

We use a small number of service providers to run Pomodo. We don’t sell your data to anyone, and we don’t share it for advertising.

• Netlify — hosts the Pomodo website (frontend).
• Render — hosts the Pomodo server (backend).
• MongoDB Atlas — hosts the database where your account, sessions, tasks, settings and mixes are stored.
• Google — provides Google sign-in (if you use it) and Google Analytics.
• PostHog — provides product analytics, as described in Section 4.
• Brevo — sends password-reset emails on our behalf. It only ever sees your email address and the reset link, for that one purpose.

Payments. Pomodo does not have a working checkout yet. No payment processor is currently connected, and we don’t hold any payment or billing information about you. If that changes, this policy will be updated before checkout goes live, and you’ll be told who processes payments and what they see.

Raycast Focus (opt-in, local to your device). If you turn on the Raycast Focus integration in Settings, the text you type into “Working on” is passed directly to the Raycast app installed on your own computer, as part of a raycast:// link your browser opens. This never goes through Pomodo’s servers and we never see or log it — it stays on your device, between your browser and Raycast.

8. How long we keep data

• Signed-in account data (sessions, tasks, settings, mixes, feedback) is kept for as long as your account exists, so your history stays available across devices.
• Guest data lives only in your browser’s local storage and stays there until you clear it, sign in (at which point it’s copied to your account), or your browser clears it for you.
• Refresh tokens expire automatically after 30 days of being unused.
• Password-reset tokens are single-use and expire after one hour.

9. Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, at the bottom of Profile → Edit profile. Because it cannot be undone, we ask you to prove it’s you first: your current password, or — if you only use Google sign-in — a Google sign-in within the last ten minutes. You also type DELETE to confirm.

When you do, it happens immediately, with no waiting period:

• Your account is erased from our database, together with everything in it: focus sessions and history, tasks and task comments, projects, settings, saved mixes (including public ones — their share links stop working), and any feedback you sent.
• Every device you were signed in on is signed out.
• If someone copied one of your public mixes into their own account, their copy stays theirs, but it no longer records that it came from you.
• Your email address is free to register again, by you or anyone else.

Analytics. Product analytics (Section 4) are stored under a random identifier, not your name or email, and are not erased automatically. If you’d like those erased too, email privacy@getpomodo.com and we’ll delete them by hand.

10. Your rights

Wherever you are, you can ask us to:

• See what personal data we hold about you.
• Correct inaccurate data (you can also do this yourself for most fields, in the app’s profile settings).
• Delete your data (see Section 9).
• Object to or restrict how we use your data.
• Export your data in a portable format.

To do any of these, email privacy@getpomodo.com. We’ll respond directly — there’s no ticketing system behind that address, it’s a small project.

If you’re in the European Economic Area, the UK, or a jurisdiction with a similar authority: you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority if you believe we’ve mishandled your data.

11. Children

Pomodo is not directed at children, and you must be at least 13 years old to create an account. If the law where you live sets a higher age for agreeing to this kind of data use, you must be at least that age, or have a parent’s or guardian’s permission. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we will delete it.

12. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we’ll update the effective date at the top and, for significant changes, make it easy to notice on the site. Continuing to use Pomodo after a change means you accept the updated policy.

13. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: privacy@getpomodo.com, or the in-app feedback form.