Made for a business of one. Or five. You'll use all of it.
Nydli is a small planning tool for people who run their own business. And it stays that way.
You won't be digging through a hundred settings or paying for forty thousand features you never use. There's no forced AI, and there isn't much to set up, which is rather the point.
We're small business owners and solopreneurs ourselves, and this is simply the tool we wanted for our own workday.
- Hosted in Germany
- No forced AI
- Stays small on purpose
- Made in Norway
Time tracking
It's easy to see what you spend your time on
You'll get a proper report of every hour you've tracked, and it keeps itself up to date while you work.
The big tools track your hours just fine, then hand you a dashboard builder and wish you luck, and there goes your Sunday. In Nydli the report is already there when you open it. You'll see every category you've worked in and every task you've put hours on, and each category adds up everything underneath it. You also get a chart at the top, showing how the period split between your biggest categories.
So you can also see whether the time you're putting in actually pays off.
So what's different?
The big tools
- You build the dashboard yourself, widget by widget.
- You pick a category every single time you log an hour.
Nydli
- The report is already there. You just pick the period you want.
- Your task already belongs to a category, so the hour goes there too.
PS: If you'd rather not count your hours at all, you can just switch the whole thing off.
One entry
You don't have to choose where to track the hour
Say you've just spent an hour writing the launch email. It belongs to the course you're building, it belongs to the launch, and you did it for a client.
In other tools you have to pick where you want that hour tracked, because they can only attach it to one place. So some of the things you'd like to keep track of, you just can't. You have to choose.
With Nydli you don't have to choose. You put the hour on the task, and the task already knows that it belongs to the course, and that it's labelled with the launch and the client.
So the same hour turns up in all three totals, and you only logged it once. There's only ever the one hour, so the numbers can't drift apart.
Put the task in the wrong category? Just move it, and all the hours you've logged move with it.
Coming from ClickUp?
You can import all your work
If you're already using ClickUp, you're probably thinking that moving over is far too big a job. You really can't spend hours copying everything over by hand.
The good news is you don't have to. We've built an import tool right into Nydli, so all you do is connect your ClickUp account and pick the lists you want.
All your tasks, subtasks and the hours you've logged will be imported as well.
You get to see exactly what Nydli will create before it creates anything.
What's inside
We're staying small on purpose
You're probably using about one percent of a tool that was built for a company with four hundred employees. You've seen the hours report already, and you'll find the rest below, including why your data never has to leave Europe. We've thrown in a couple of things we're oddly proud of as well.
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Your data stays in Europe
We're a European company, our servers are in Germany, and the company that runs them is European too. There isn't an American company anywhere in the chain.
The US CLOUD Act reaches data held by American firms no matter where the servers physically are, so moving an American tool over to its EU region doesn't actually change anything. It all comes down to who owns the company.
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There's no AI in here
There's no AI slop cluttering up your workspace, and nothing extra sneaking onto your bill for it either. We never send anything you write off somewhere to be analysed.
And if you do want an assistant, you can bring your own. You can read more about that further down.
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We'll make it better instead of bigger
We'd much rather make the things you already use work properly than pile loads of new features on top of them.
And we're not going to grow into the tool you're trying to get away from, however much sense it makes on a spreadsheet.
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You don't have to start from scratch
You can't tell much from an empty screen. So we've made nine ready-made businesses for you to choose from, and each one comes with categories, tasks and a whole year of hours already logged.
If you like the one you picked, keep it and make it yours. You can also edit it, or delete it once you've had a poke around.
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You won't find forty menus
You'll find everything Nydli does on one menu bar, and you'll have seen all of it in an afternoon.
You'll use most of it too, because there's no ninety-nine percent hiding behind a submenu you never open. You won't find a second floor later on.
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We don't move the buttons
You know where everything is in the tools you use every day, without having to look.
We hate opening something we've used for years and finding that the button has moved, with a cheerful little tour explaining why it's better now. So we're not going to redesign the place every spring just to look busy.
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There's only one kind of label
Other tools make you decide whether the thing you're adding is a tag, a label or a custom field. Then you've got three different systems to keep tidy, and you can never remember which one you used.
In Nydli you just add a label. Scribble “Urgent” on something and move on, or build “Client › Acme” when you want a bit of structure. Then you can pull every hour you've spent on that client, from every corner of your workspace, in one go.
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Your code looks like code
Paste a snippet into a task and Nydli highlights it properly, in any of 235 languages. That includes the ones nobody else bothers with, because one of us teaches FPGA design, so VHDL and Verilog were never going to be missing.
PS: Python, JavaScript and HTML are in there too, obviously.
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You can have several workspaces
Most people running a business have something else on the go as well, whether that's a side project or a committee you somehow ended up chairing.
You can keep them in separate workspaces and switch between them without signing out and back in again.
Our limits
Things we promise never to build
If it belongs in Slack, it doesn't belong here. Every tool you've outgrown started small, then went looking for enterprise customers to grow into. We'd rather just stay the thing you don't have to think about.
- Chat
- Documents
- A wiki
- A CRM
- AI agents
- Sprints
- Workload views
- An “ecosystem”
Your own assistant
You can bring your own AI, if you want one
Maybe you've got Claude or ChatGPT open all day and you'd quite like a hand in here too. You can have that, you just have to ask for it.
Nydli has no AI of its own, so nothing happens until you connect your own. You do that with something called an MCP bridge, and it means your assistant comes to your data. We never send your data to it.
Only the owner of a workspace can switch it on, and it asks for your password every time you change it. This is the one setting that lets something outside Nydli reach in, so we're strict about it.
Your assistant can see everything you can see, and if you want it to, it can make and change tasks, categories and labels for you.
It can never delete anything. We didn't build it a delete button at all.
It can archive things, and you can undo that whenever you like. And if you go off the whole idea, you cut the connection and it stops working there and then.
Our competitors
The big tools aren't built for you
We used them too. But read their front pages and you can see exactly who they have in mind, and it isn't people like us. These are their own words, straight off their home pages.
“Software to replace all software”
Software that does one job, then gets out of your way.
“60% of work is lost in context – and AI is lost without it”
Your hours stay on your tasks. Nothing gets lost, and no AI is involved.
“People and agents working as one team”
Just people here. You're the one doing the work, and you get the credit.
“Trusted by over 60% of the Fortune 500”
Trusted by two Norwegians and a cat. We'll grow, but that's the bar.
“The OS for human-agent teams”
A list, a calendar and a timesheet, made for a human.
“Your team just got bigger”
Your team is exactly the size you chose.
“Where teams and agents Think together.”
The thinking is yours.
“Keep work moving 24/7 with agents.”
Nydli doesn't work nights. Neither should you.
Nothing wrong with building for the Fortune 500. It's just that you're not them, and neither are we.
The team
We're two people and a cat
We're Lene and Jonas, two Norwegians who got tired of the tool we were using and built the small version.
We've used the same project tool since back when it was still good, and now use roughly one percent of it. It grew out of all proportion, the way these tools always do.
We don't answer to investors or a committee. We built it for ourselves, and we think you'll want it too.
The cat is called Ina. She's the office manager and runs a tight ship. Nobody else is allowed to sleep on the job. She's found her way into the app as well, we couldn't stop her.
Ina Tangen
How it feels
Built by humans, and it shows
Your tools should be something you actually like using.
We're just two normal people working as solopreneurs, not a product team. We didn't want Nydli to feel like boring corporate software, so we've made it pretty and put a bit of whimsy in it. Some small touches that make you smile on a Tuesday morning.
We want it to feel like your own workspace, something creative and a bit of fun that suits the way you work. You shouldn't feel like you're logging in to some company with four hundred employees and a beige intranet.
Would you rather have it calm? Don't worry, you can easily turn it off and make everything plain and simple.
Questions
You've probably got a question or two
You're bound to be wondering about a few things before you put your name on a list. We've written down what we can tell you so far. If your question isn't here, write to hello@nydli.com and you'll get a reply from one of us.
When can I start using it?
We're opening a closed beta soon, with room for a small number of testers. We're keeping it small because we want to get things right with a few people before we let everybody in.
You won't pay anything to test it. And if you stay with us afterwards, you keep a lower price than everyone else for as long as you're a customer.
Leave your name and email on the list below, and we'll write to you when you can apply for a place.
What's it going to cost?
We haven't set the prices yet. We want to be sure of the number before we ask anyone to pay it, and you'll hear it from us before we put it on the website.
The beta costs you nothing, and you keep the tester's price for as long as you stay a customer. If you leave and sign up again later, you pay what everyone else pays.
Do I have to track my time?
No. You can use Nydli as a list and a calendar and never touch the timer, and you won't get nagged about the hours you haven't logged.
Can I use it with other people?
Yes. You can invite people into a workspace, and everyone works on their own tasks and logs their own hours in it.
We make Nydli for a business of one, or five. You won't find approval chains or a workload view for a manager, because we don't build for the kind of company that needs them.
Can I use Nydli if I don't run a business?
Yes. We never ask what you do for a living, and you can use the same categories and lists for anything you need to keep track of.
You can make a category for your daughter's handball and another one for the cabin. You can keep the football team you coach in one workspace and the board you ended up on at the housing co-op in another.
We write about Nydli as a tool for people running their own business, because that's who we build it for. You're very welcome to use it for everything else too.
Can I import my work from another tool?
If you're in ClickUp, yes. You connect your account and pick the lists you want, and we import the tasks, subtasks and logged hours in them. Recurrence rules, docs and whiteboards stay in ClickUp.
ClickUp is the only tool we import from today. We'll be looking at other tools later, and we'll know more about what we can do when we get there.
You can read every step of it before you start, on the import page.
Can I export my work?
Yes, and you don't have to ask us for it. You'll find a button in Settings that exports the whole workspace as one file, with your categories, tasks, subtasks, labels, dates and every hour you've logged. You choose whether your files and images come with it.
You get the hours as a spreadsheet, and every task as a document you can open in any text editor. It's your work, so you should be able to leave with it.
You'll find what comes in the file, folder by folder, on the export page.
What languages is Nydli in?
You can have Nydli in English or Norwegian (bokmål). You pick the one you want in Settings, and you can change your mind whenever you like.
We're Norwegian, so we write both languages ourselves.
What happens if I stop paying?
You keep working to the end of the period you've paid for. After that the workspace turns read-only for 30 days. You can read what you've put in and download everything, but you can't create or change anything.
Renew inside those 30 days and it all comes back exactly as you left it. After the 30 days we delete the content, so export whatever you want to keep before then.
The subscription page goes through the dates, and what you can still do on each of them.
Our help centre is already open, so you can see how every corner of Nydli works before you sign up.
Launching soon. Written in Norway, hosted in Germany.