Time Hive

Time Hive answers the question every automation project eventually faces: how much time is this actually saving? The application, a tamper-proof record of every automation run turned into clear time-saved dashboards, was built by Swarm Labs. Spotlight’s brief was everything the ledger stands on: the gold-on-dark design that makes the numbers feel like evidence, and the infrastructure that carries every event safely from a client’s tools to the dashboard.

Automation value is invisible, and Time Hive exists to make it visible, credible and safe to stand behind, which set a high bar for both design and infrastructure:

• Proof, not decoration: the product’s entire promise is a record you can rely on; the dashboards had to read like evidence, with numbers you’d happily put in front of a client, not marketing charts.
• Two halves drifting apart: the customer-facing app and the admin side had each developed their own look, and keeping colours and dark mode consistent by hand had become a constant tax on every change.
• Strangers at the front door: activity reports arrive from other people’s tools around the clock. Every one has to be checked as genuine, and none may ever be counted twice, or the ledger’s credibility collapses.
• Many businesses, one platform: agencies report to their own clients from the same platform, so each account’s data had to be sealed off from every other’s at the deepest level.
• Shipping couldn’t cost hours: a product about recovering time couldn’t lose it to manual release processes.

Spotlight designed the ledger’s visual language and built the infrastructure it runs on:

• A ledger design language: signature gold on near-black with the animated hourglass-bee mark, a sunburst of time saved, a contribution-style activity chart and counters that tick upwards as the evidence arrives.
• One source of truth for the design: both faces of the product, customer gold and admin indigo, now draw from a single set of design rules, so they stay consistent (dark modes included) without anyone repainting screens by hand.
• A checked, honest front door: every incoming report is verified as genuine, duplicates are recognised and set aside, and accepted events are written into a record that can only ever be added to, never edited.
• Sealed accounts: each account’s data is kept separate by the database itself, a separation the application couldn’t bypass even if it tried.
• Releases that run themselves: updates go live automatically the moment they’re approved, with billing handled end to end by Stripe.

The redesign brought both faces of the product onto one set of design rules, so the customer and admin sides (and their dark modes) now stay in step automatically. Updates ship themselves the moment they’re approved, and every event that reaches the ledger has been checked, de-duplicated and locked in. The clearest sign it works is on the homepage itself: a live counter of hours saved across the platform, already past the 275-hour mark, every one of them traceable to a permanent entry in the ledger.

Spotlight continues to run the infrastructure behind timehive.io, from the platform and database to the hosting and the automatic release pipeline, alongside Managed Website Hosting and support across the wider Swarm Labs product fleet. Design and infrastructure by Spotlight Studios; application by Swarm Labs.