YT Ledger

An expense manager for your YouTube watch history — categorize what you watch, see where the time goes, budget it. Local-only.

YT Ledger is an expense manager for your YouTube watch time. Every video you watch becomes an entry in a local ledger, entries are organized on a value ladder from "brain rot" to "courses & lectures", and weekly budgets can be enforced right on youtube.com — gently or strictly. Expense trackers work because they make spending visible: every transaction lands in a category, and the totals tell you something you didn't want to hear. YT Ledger does the same for time. It's not about watching less. It's about knowing what the time actually went to. HOW IT WORKS • Sync — YouTube has no history API, so the extension reads the history page itself, locally in your browser. Rewatches are counted as separate entries. • Ledger — every video becomes an entry with estimated watch time (duration × progress), a category and a spot on your value ladder. Search, filter, and assign entries individually or in bulk. • Rules — auto-categorize by title (including regex), channel or duration. The first matching rule wins, and manual assignments always beat rules. • Budgets — weekly budgets per category, enforced on youtube.com in two modes: – Gentle: a chip marks over-budget videos in your feed, and watch pages show a banner. – Strict: over-budget videos are hidden behind a veil, and watch pages are gated behind "Watch anyway" — playback stays paused until you choose to. • Insights — where the time actually went, week by week, with drill-downs, trends and a category ladder you can reorder to match what you consider valuable. PRIVACY Everything stays in your browser. No server, no account, no analytics, no tracking. Durations for videos you watched are looked up from public YouTube watch pages; nothing is ever sent anywhere else. Export your full ledger as CSV or JSON at any time. Works in Chrome, Brave, Edge and other Chromium browsers, and in Firefox 128+.