UNTIL Timer

UNTIL is a finish-time-first iPhone timer: set when you want to stop, not a duration. Your finish line stays fixed even when life interrupts, helping you refocus without recalculating.

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Inspiration

Most timers ask one question: How long?

But in everyday life, I often already know something more useful: when I need to stop.

If I want to work until 3:30 PM, a traditional 25-minute timer can become surprisingly fragile. Get interrupted, restart it three times, and 25 minutes can quietly become 75.

But 3:30 PM is still 3:30 PM.

That simple difference became UNTIL.

I wanted a timer built around a finish time rather than a duration — a quiet tool that gives each block of the day a clear endpoint, even when real life interrupts.

What it does

UNTIL Timer is a finish-time-first timer for iPhone.

Instead of calculating how many minutes you need, you choose the time you want to finish. UNTIL continuously shows exactly how much time remains until that moment.

The core experience is intentionally simple:

  1. Choose an end time.
  2. Start the countdown.
  3. Keep your finish line visible while you work.
  4. When the time arrives, UNTIL ends with you.

Because the finish time stays fixed, an interruption does not change the goal. You can step away, come back, and immediately see what remains without recalculating or restarting your intention.

UNTIL works in portrait and landscape, making the countdown easy to read from across a desk or room.

The interface is designed around clarity, focus, and thoughtful interaction. Users can also personalize their timer with colors, sounds, themes, saved timers, titles, and repeating schedules.

UNTIL is deliberately not a productivity dashboard.

There are no feeds, streaks, points, or layers of productivity theater competing for attention.

The idea is simple:

Give your day a finish line.

UNTIL PRO expands the experience with saved timers, titles, repeats, personalization, sounds, themes, and more.

To keep the purchase model clear, users can choose:

  • Monthly
  • Yearly, with a 14-day free trial
  • One-time purchase

RevenueCat powers the purchase and entitlement experience behind UNTIL PRO.

How we built it

UNTIL was built as a real shipping product, not only as a hackathon prototype.

The product uses a React and TypeScript codebase with an iOS app layer, with RevenueCat handling purchases and PRO entitlements.

The timer experience was designed around one core rule: the end time is the source of truth.

That decision affects the countdown model, interruption behavior, saved timers, portrait and landscape layouts, and the way the interface communicates time.

A large part of development focused on making FREE and PRO states reliable:

  • FREE and PRO timer behavior
  • Purchase and entitlement handling
  • Purchase restoration
  • Expired subscriptions
  • Saved timer persistence
  • Monthly, yearly, and one-time products
  • Real-device behavior
  • Portrait and landscape layouts

I also treated the visual design as part of the product logic rather than decoration.

The default Paper theme keeps the interface quiet, while colors and sounds let users give different kinds of time their own character without adding unnecessary complexity.

Challenges we ran into

One of the hardest challenges was deciding what not to build.

A timer can very easily turn into a productivity system full of dashboards, statistics, streaks, and extra controls. I repeatedly simplified or removed ideas in order to protect UNTIL's core experience.

Another major challenge was entitlement state.

FREE users need a useful timer. PRO users need their premium data and features. And if PRO expires, premium data should remain safe without accidentally breaking the FREE experience.

That required carefully separating FREE and PRO workspace behavior so entitlement changes could fail safely and predictably.

Responsive layout was another challenge.

UNTIL is deliberately minimal, which means even small spacing or alignment problems become very visible. I spent significant time refining portrait, landscape, iPhone, and larger-screen behavior so that the timer remained readable and calm across different layouts.

Finally, the product had to stay visually polished while still proving that every screen shown in the demo represented the real app. That meant treating the actual UNTIL UI as the source of truth throughout the Shipaton video production process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

UNTIL went from a simple idea to a real, shipping iPhone product with a distinct interaction model, a polished visual system, and a working RevenueCat-powered business model.

I am especially proud that the core idea survived the entire development process:

Set an end time. Keep the finish line visible. Return to it even after interruptions.

The product now includes:

  • A finish-time-first countdown experience
  • Portrait and landscape modes
  • Saved timers
  • Custom titles
  • Repeating schedules
  • Multiple themes and sounds
  • Custom color support
  • FREE and PRO experiences
  • Monthly, yearly, and one-time purchase options
  • RevenueCat-powered entitlement and purchase restoration

I am also proud that UNTIL became more than a hackathon demo.

It is a product designed to continue beyond Shipaton, with an App Store release, a public product website, a real monetization model, and room to learn from actual users.

What we learned

The biggest lesson was that a small change in interaction design can create a meaningfully different product.

Changing the question from:

“How long?”

to:

“Until when?”

affected almost everything — the timer model, interruption behavior, interface hierarchy, landscape mode, saved timers, and even the way I thought about monetization.

I also learned that good product design often comes from subtraction.

The more I removed things that did not support the finish-time experience, the clearer UNTIL became.

RevenueCat also reinforced another lesson: monetization works best when it follows the same philosophy as the product.

UNTIL is built around clear choices, so the purchase model follows the same principle: monthly, yearly, or one-time — without unnecessary complexity.

What's next for UNTIL Timer

The next step is to learn from real users.

I want to understand when people naturally choose a finish time instead of a duration, which saved timers become part of their daily routines, and where UNTIL can reduce friction without becoming a heavier productivity tool.

Future improvements will focus on refining the experience rather than simply adding more features.

The goal is not to create more productivity theater.

It is to keep making one small idea better:

Set the finish time. See what remains. Finish what matters.

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