ThunderRate support

In three lines

Set a project up

Give it a client, say whether it is a fixed fee or billed by the hour, and put in the hours you quoted. Those quoted hours are what the real rate is measured against.

Log the time

Run the timer, tap +15m / +30m / +1h, or type an entry by hand. Every entry goes under one of five headings: work, revisions, calls, admin, waiting.

Read the number

The fee divided by the hours logged is your real rate. The card shows it next to the quoted one, with the gap between them and what the unbilled hours cost you.

Questions about the numbers

The real rate looks far too low

That is usually the app working, not failing. The real rate counts every hour logged against the project, and most of us quote for the work while the revisions, the calls, the chasing and the waiting quietly double it.

Check the unpaid faff row on the card: it totals every hour that was not the work itself and what those hours cost. If that number is large, the rate is honest.

Which hours should go in

All of them. A kickoff call, a round of edits, formatting an invoice, a week spent waiting on someone's legal team — each has a category, and leaving them out gives you back exactly the flattering number you already had.

Fixed fee against by the hour

On a fixed price project the fee is agreed for the whole job, and the price per hour is what that fee works out to across the hours you logged — the figure that moves as you work.

On a project billed by the hour, every logged hour is charged at the agreed price, so the amount due grows with the log instead.

The target rate

What you want to be earning an hour, set once in the profile. Every project is measured against it, and the trend screen shows your real average next to it. Without one, the app can still show the quoted-against-real gap, just not how far off your own goal you are.

A project is missing from a chart

Charts work in one currency. Projects set in another are left out rather than converted, because a made-up exchange rate would quietly falsify the average. The average delta chart also only counts closed projects — an unfinished one has no final number yet.

Nothing shows on the trend screen

It needs a few entries before it means anything. Log time across a couple of days and the charts fill in on their own.

Questions about the app

The timer is running and I left

It keeps running; the card says how long it has been going. Stop and log writes the entry, Discard timer throws it away. Pick the category before you start — that is what the entry is filed under.

Fixing or removing an entry

Swipe a row in the log to edit or delete it. Deleting an entry recalculates the project immediately. Deleting a project takes every hour logged against it, and neither can be undone.

What goes to the client

The report is the time log, entry by entry, as a PDF or a CSV through the normal share sheet. Three switches decide what it contains: the notes, the category breakdown, and your rates.

Rates are off by default. The client gets the hours; your own arithmetic is yours. A project with nothing logged against it produces no report, since there would be nothing in it.

Finished projects

Closing a project moves it to the archive, where its numbers stay readable and out of the active list. It can be reopened at any time.

The sample projects

Four made-up projects with a full log, so an empty app is not the first thing you see. They can be switched off or started over in the profile, and nothing you added yourself is touched either way.

The daily reminder

One local notification, sent by your phone rather than by a server, nudging you to log the day before it blurs. If it never appears, notifications are turned off for the app in iOS Settings.

Photos, tracking, purchases

The photo permission is for one thing only — an avatar in your profile — and the picture stays on the phone. The tracking prompt on first launch is the system's, and declining it changes nothing in the app. There is nothing to buy: no subscription, no paid tier, no locked projects.

Where the data sits

On the phone

Projects and every logged hour live in one file in the app's own storage; the profile, the running timer and the reminder are kept beside it. There is no account and nothing syncs, so a second phone starts empty and a deleted app takes the log with it.

Erasing it

Reset all data in the profile removes every project, every hour and the profile itself. The confirmation is the only warning you get, and there is no copy anywhere to restore from.

What leaves the device

The reports you share, when you share them, and the technical data described in the privacy statement — identifiers, analytics, crash and attribution information. Requests about your data go to the address above.

What it needs

An iPhone on iOS 16.0 or later. Logging, the charts and the reports all work with the network off. The app speaks English, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Czech and Bulgarian, and the language can follow the phone or be set on its own.