Time Review: A $20 Mac Menu Bar Clock With Fine Print

Say you’ve got a client in Mumbai, another in Lisbon, and a contractor in Manila. Every time one of them proposes a call, you open a browser tab, search for a converter, do some mental arithmetic and hope daylight saving hasn’t shifted something. It’s a small tax, but you pay it several times a week.

Time is a Mac app that tries to remove that tax. It sits in your menu bar, shows the zones you care about, and lets you preview a meeting time across all of them. It’s $20 on AppSumo as a lifetime deal, down from a $49.99 list price. We haven’t used it ourselves, so everything below comes from the listing, and I’ll point out where the listing leaves gaps.

What lives in the menu bar

The core idea is simple. You add cities or custom time zones, give each one a label, and the clocks appear in your menu bar. The listing says there’s no limit on how many zones you can track, which beats tools that cap you at a handful.

You can drag zones into any order. You can also decide, zone by zone, whether each one shows in the menu bar itself or only in the popover. That matters more than it sounds. Five clocks crammed into a busy menu bar is clutter, so keeping your two key zones visible and the rest one click away is a sensible setup.

There are display options as well: 12 or 24-hour format, custom fonts, colors and alignment, and a setting to hide your own local zone. Day and night segments are color-coded, so you can tell at a glance whether the person you’re about to message is asleep.

The time scroller is the feature to judge it by

A row of clocks isn’t hard to find elsewhere. The time scroller is where Time has to earn its price. You drag it up to 24 hours in either direction and every zone updates together, so you can slide until you find a slot that isn’t midnight for somebody.

A date picker covers future meetings. That’s the part people tend to get wrong, because the gap between two cities isn’t always the same next month as it is today.

Adding a zone is flexible too. Type a 3-letter IATA airport code like JFK, LHR or NRT and the app searches a database of more than 5,500 airports, showing the code, airport name and city so you can confirm you’ve picked the right place. If you travel a lot or work with people who think in airport codes, that’s a handy shortcut. If you don’t, a city name does the same job.

Daylight saving and fixed offsets

Time warns you about DST changes up to 7 days ahead. If you coordinate across hemispheres, that’s useful, because the US, Europe and the southern hemisphere all change on different dates. A week’s notice is enough to catch a recurring call that’s about to move by an hour for one side.

The listing also mentions fixed UTC-offset zones, such as UTC+5:30 or UTC-8, which don’t shift with daylight saving. The use case is a counterpart whose contract or system always runs on a fixed offset. It’s niche, but if that’s your situation it prevents a repeating mistake.

Calendar view and one-click joins

Time reads your calendar through the macOS Calendar app. Whatever accounts you’ve already connected there, such as Google or iCloud, can appear in the app. The listing describes no direct sign-in to those services, so I’d treat Time as a viewer layered on top of what macOS already has.

The app detects meeting links for Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex. When an event is about to start, you click it and join, instead of hunting through an invite email. There’s also a day view with a vertical timeline, and you can dismiss and restore individual events.

On privacy, the listing says calendar data is accessed on-device and that nothing, including time zone preferences, goes to external servers. It also says the app contains no analytics or tracking code. That’s the seller’s claim, so read it as a claim. Still, it’s the right pitch for a tool that sees your whole schedule.

The deal, and where the listing gets muddy

The price is $20 for lifetime access. You have to redeem your code within 60 days of purchase, and the deal isn’t stackable, so a second code won’t add seats or licenses.

This is where I’d slow down. The plan table reads ‘License covers: 5 Mac / 1 Mac’ and ‘Free automatic updates: Forever / 1 year’. It doesn’t say which value belongs to the AppSumo deal and which to the developer’s own retail license. The deal tier text says ‘All future plan updates’, which points toward forever. But the developer’s FAQ talks about one year of free updates, and about a 1 Mac versus 3 Mac split that doesn’t match the ‘5 Mac’ figure at all.

So I can’t tell you how many Macs the deal covers, or whether updates run forever or for a year. If it turns out to be one Mac with a year of updates, $20 is still modest. The FAQ says your license keeps working indefinitely after that first year, with no forced cutoff, so you’d simply stop receiving new versions. Get a straight answer from the seller or AppSumo support if either detail matters to you.

The 7-day trial gives you every feature with no credit card, so you can try the real thing first. Team licensing exists as well, starting at 5 seats with discounts at larger sizes, but it’s quoted by email through the developer and isn’t part of this deal.

Who should pass

If you’re on Windows or Linux, this isn’t for you. If your Mac is stuck below macOS 14 Sonoma, it won’t run. Those are hard stops.

It’s also a viewer, not a scheduler. Nothing in the listing mentions booking links, availability sharing or letting clients pick a slot. If your problem is getting people onto your calendar, you need a different tool.

The listing gives us little to judge the developer’s track record by. There are no customer numbers, no stated roadmap, and no review detail beyond AppSumo’s own summary, which is marketing copy. At $20 that risk is small, but it exists.

If you talk to people in three or more zones every week, install the trial, connect your real calendar, and run a normal scheduling week through it. Then put the license and update questions to the seller before you spend the $20.