How much battery does a screen-recording time tracker use?

Battery use depends on your Mac, what you capture, and where AI analysis runs. We have not published a controlled Dayflow battery benchmark, so we cannot give you a reliable percentage or number of minutes lost per day.

Recording and analysis are separate workloads

Dayflow captures screen activity at roughly one frame every ten seconds and stores recordings on your Mac. Capturing, encoding, storing, and reading that material all use resources. A lower frame rate alone does not establish the app’s total energy use.

With local AI through Ollama or LM Studio, your Mac also runs the model that interprets screenshots. Include that model process when checking CPU, GPU, memory, or energy use. Looking only at the Dayflow process would miss part of the workload.

With your own cloud provider or Dayflow Pro, analysis runs off-device. Your Mac still handles capture, storage, and network transfers. See local and cloud processing for the privacy differences.

Compare it on your Mac

Use comparable work sessions with the same display brightness, power settings, apps, and AI mode. Record the macOS version, Mac model, session duration, and whether the machine was plugged in. Compare a session with recording paused against one with recording enabled and analysis caught up.

In Activity Monitor, inspect Dayflow and any local model processes. Use the Energy tab over a representative session rather than treating a single CPU reading as a battery benchmark. Also check whether analysis is still pending: a quiet process may simply not have done the work yet.

Choosing a mode

Use local AI when keeping screenshot analysis on-device is your priority and your hardware can run the model comfortably. Use a cloud mode when you prefer off-device inference and accept the provider’s processing terms. Test your normal workload before relying on either mode for a full day away from a charger.