Kiku Hours is made by Angus Blomley, a developer who learns Japanese by listening and got tired of not trusting his own hour count. Kiku (聞く) is Japanese for "to listen".

The problem it solves is narrow. People who learn a language through comprehensible input measure progress in hours, and every roadmap they follow is written in hours of input in the target language. But the tools that count those hours count minutes a video was open, in whatever language happened to be playing, ads included. A number that drifts from the truth by a little every day is worse than no number, because you can't see the drift. Kiku Hours counts from the player's own clock, listens for the language, and holds back time in a language you already speak, so the total is the one the roadmaps mean.

It's a one-person project. There is no company behind it, no account to create, and no plan to sell the data, because there is no data to sell: everything stays in your browser. It's free, and it will stay free for what it does today. If a paid tier ever exists it will be for something new, not for the counting.

Questions, bugs and ideas: ablomley04@gmail.com, or the support page.