Dayflow for Windows? Here's the Closest Thing (2026)
3 min read · TimeLeak
Dayflow earned its Hacker News love honestly: it records your Mac screen at 1 frame per second, has an AI narrate your day every 15 minutes, and renders a timeline that says "Reviewed PR comments: 45 min" instead of "Chrome: 3 hours." It's free, open source — and officially Mac-only, with Windows "coming soon."
Updated August 2026.
Being honest about the whole landscape: community Windows ports of Dayflow exist on GitHub — the most complete is SeiShonagon520/Dayflow (silent background recording, AI analysis, a timeline, a prebuilt EXE; README is Chinese-first with an English version in the repo). If you want the literal Dayflow experience — the narrated timeline — try it first; it's free and open source. Go in with open eyes: it's a young unofficial project from a small account, you bring your own model API key (it defaults to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint), and you should skim the code before letting any low-star repo record your screen — advice we'd give about anyone's watcher, including ours.
TimeLeak ($19 one-time) is the other way to get the job done on Windows today — same core idea (screen understanding beats app-name bucketing), different design choices, maintained as a product:
| TimeLeak (Windows, today) | Dayflow (Mac) | |
|---|---|---|
| Capture | 1 frame + 1 metadata line / 5s, all monitors | 1 fps screen recording, focused display only |
| AI | one evening brief on any key you have — Anthropic/OpenAI/Gemini — or a local model via Ollama (~0–3¢/day) | every 15 min via Gemini key or local models |
| Output | fix-list: named leaks + minutes + the mechanical fix | narrated timeline + timelapse |
| Token budget | ~5k tokens/day (aggregates, not video) | heavy — continuous vision calls add up fast |
| Price | free watcher; Pro $19 one-time | free, open source |
The design difference that matters
Dayflow narrates everything, every 15 minutes — which is delightful, and burns either real API money or your laptop battery (its local-model mode is rated a "B-/C+" by its own author). TimeLeak bets that what you actually act on is one honest evening brief: aggregate the day locally for free, spend one small API call naming the leaks, hand you the fixes. Cheaper by orders of magnitude, and the output is a to-do, not a diary.
Free watcher here — Windows-first, multi-monitor, running today.
FAQ
When Dayflow ships Windows, should I switch?
Try it — it's free and open source, and competition is good for you. TimeLeak's bets are different enough to keep both: 5-second sampling instead of video, one brief instead of continuous narration, a fix-list instead of a timeline.
Does TimeLeak make a timelapse like Dayflow?
No. The frames exist locally (7 days), but the product is the brief. If a shareable timelapse is the feature you want, that's genuinely Dayflow's.
Why does TimeLeak cost money when Dayflow is free?
Dayflow is a passion project; TimeLeak is a maintained product with a one-time price and no subscription. Both beat $120+/year rent.