About Hokkori
Hokkori (ほっこり) is a Japanese word for the feeling of gentle warmth inside — the small glow of wrapping your hands around a hot mug on a cold day. There's no English word for it. We built an app around it instead.
Why a cozy timer?
Most productivity tools treat focus as a performance problem: streaks to defend, dashboards to optimize, ads between sessions. But for most of us the hard part of focusing isn't discipline — it's that sitting down to work feels cold. Hokkori starts from the opposite idea: make the place you focus somewhere you actually want to be. A warm pixel-art room. Rain on the window while the timer runs. Sound you mix yourself until it feels right. The pomodoro method does the structuring; the room does the inviting.
The whole room opens in about 100 kilobytes
Hokkori is built with a small engineering obsession: the room — pets, weather, and all — is hand-drawn SVG, and the sound is a 3-channel mixer: rain and fire play carefully chosen real recordings (40-second Pixabay loops) with a synthesized fallback so the room still sounds alive offline; the lofi channel plays three Pixabay tracks or a synthesized lo-fi pad; and the chimes are synthesized in your browser with the Web Audio API. No video backgrounds, no scene libraries. The room opens in about 100 kB gzipped, smaller than most sites' cookie banners; the optional cloud backup loads quietly afterward, and everything together stays under 200 kB. That's why it loads instantly, works fully offline as an installable PWA, and runs happily on old laptops and bad connections.
What we promise
- Free, no ads — ever. Everything you see in the web app today stays free. Ads are the direct negation of calm and will never appear. If Hokkori helps you, you can buy us a coffee.
- No account required, no cookies, no ad tracking. Your tasks, stats, streaks, and settings live in your own browser, and you can export them anytime. The times of your focus sessions are backed up under a random anonymous ID, never your name. Without an email, that is all that leaves your browser besides your room settings, pet name and city, and your task text stays on your device. If you choose to sign up with an email (used only to sign you in), your stats and streak, tasks, room settings, postcards and milestones follow you to every device you sign in on. Usage analytics are anonymous and cookie-free (Umami).
- Simplicity is a feature. Every addition has to earn its place in the room. We'd rather be small and loved than large and tolerated.
Who makes Hokkori
Hokkori is made by Zettaporn, a solo developer based in Thailand, who builds it in the open. The app is free and funded by readers who buy a coffee on Ko-fi — there is no company, no investors, and no plan to add ads. Questions and feedback go straight to the person who wrote the code.
Press & mentions
Nothing yet — Hokkori launched in September 2026.
What's next
The long-term dream is ambient presence: the quiet company of other people focusing around the world — a count of candles lit right now, never webcams, never leaderboards. Cozy first, together softly.
Start with a focus session, or read our plain-language guide to the Pomodoro Technique.