I Built the Writing Tracker I Couldn't Find

ScribeTrack is live on Android today. Here's why I made it.

I have a confession to make. I’ve been lying to myself about my writing for years.

Not about whether I was writing. I was writing. I have the word counts to prove it. What I was lying to myself about was how I was writing—how fast, how consistently, and whether I was actually on track to finish anything in any reasonable amount of time.

The spreadsheet I was using—and I know I’m not alone in this, because I’ve talked with enough writers to know that most of us are running some version of a homemade spreadsheet held together with conditional formatting and and bubble gum—told me how many words I’d written. That’s it. That’s all it did. It couldn’t tell me whether 800 words on a Tuesday was good or bad for me specifically. It couldn’t tell me when I’d finish my project at my current pace. It definitely couldn’t tell me how many hours a week I needed to write in order to hit the deadline I’d set for myself.

Word count is a vanity metric. I’m sorry. I know we’re all very attached to it. But word count without context doesn’t tell you anything useful.

Here’s the number that actually matters: words per hour.

Why Words Per Hour?

Words per hour is the metric that ties everything else together.

If you know your words per hour, you know:

• How long it will take to finish your project

• How many hours a week you need to write to hit your deadline

• Whether you’re a fast drafter who edits heavily or a slow, careful writer who produces cleaner first drafts (and, therefore, which kind of schedule works for you)

• On any given day, whether you were in flow or grinding it out

Further, for the freelancers in the room, the number that justifies your invoice. “I spent six hours on this” is a lot harder to argue with when you have a logged session history showing your start time, your end time, your starting word count, and your ending word count. That’s not an estimate. That’s receipts.

Enter ScribeTrack Writing Tracker

ScribeTrack is a mobile app—available now on Android, iOS coming soon—that I built from scratch, by myself, for writers.

Here’s how it works.

You create a project. You give it a title, a target word count, and optionally a deadline. That’s it. You’re set up in about thirty seconds.

Then, when you sit down to write, you log a session. You tell the app your starting word count, your ending word count, and your start and end time. ScribeTrack does the math: it calculates how many words you wrote and how long it took, and it gives you your words per hour for that session.

Here’s the part I’m most proud of: ScribeTrack automatically chains your sessions. The next time you open Quick Add to log a session for that project, your starting word count is already filled in—it pulls from wherever you left off last time. You just enter your new ending word count and your times. That’s it. Thirty seconds, maybe less.

Over time, the app builds a picture of your writing pace. It shows you your average words per hour, your longest streak of consecutive writing days, and—this is the Pro feature I built the whole thing around—a finish date predictor that tells you exactly when you’ll complete your project based on your actual pace over the last seven days. Not a guess. Not a motivational estimate. Math.

There’s also a weekly writing schedule builder that works backward from your deadline: tell it how many days a week you can write and how long your sessions tend to be, and it tells you whether your current schedule gets you to your goal in time — and if not, what needs to change.

Why Free Forever Is Not Lip Service

I want to be straightforward about this because it annoys the heck out of me when apps bury the useful stuff behind a paywall and call it “free.”

The free tier of ScribeTrack gives you:

• Up to 3 active projects

• Full session logging with words per hour

• Your writing streak

• 365 days of analytics history

• No ads, ever

The Pro tier ($2.99/month or $29.99/year) adds:

• Unlimited projects

• The finish date predictor

• The weekly schedule builder

• CSV export of your session history (useful for invoicing)

If you have three or fewer active projects and you don’t need deadline prediction, the free tier is a complete, useful tool. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I don’t believe in the model where free is hamstrung to get you to subscribe to pro. Free forever gets you a writing tracker that replaces your homebrew spreadsheet and brings you the analytics that will help you turn your writing hobby into a writing habit.

Who This Is For

ScribeTrack is for you if:

• You’re a novelist who needs to see whether you’re actually on track to finish your draft, not just whether you wrote something today. The finish date predictor is built for you. Log a week of sessions and it will tell you, based on your real pace, exactly when you’ll type “the end”—or how far behind schedule you are.

• You’re a freelancer who writes on deadline and needs to show your work. The session history is a clean, exportable record of your hours. It’s the difference between “I spent about fifteen hours on this” and a log that shows every session, dated, with start and end times.

• You’re anyone who wants to treat writing like a serious commitment instead of something you do when you feel like it. That’s the honest version of why I built this. I wanted a tool that would hold me accountable to my own goals—not by nagging me, but by showing me the data. Sometimes the most motivating thing in the world is seeing your words-per-hour tick up over time.

A Note on the “Solo-Developed” Thing

I built ScribeTrack myself. The backend, the database, the API, the mobile app—all of it. I am not a software engineer by training. I’m an editor who learned to build things because I needed them.

I mention this not to brag but because I think it matters for how you understand the product. This is not a VC-backed startup with a team of engineers and a growth marketing department. It’s a tool I built because I wanted it to exist, and because I believe writers deserve better data about their own work than a word count and a vague sense of whether today was a good day.

ScribeTrack will keep getting better because I use it myself and I care about it. That’s the only roadmap that matters to me right now.

Download ScribeTrack free on Google Play.

iOS coming soon.

If you try it, I’d genuinely love to know what you think—drop a comment below or send me an email at hello at scribetrack dot ink.