Why CountLink exists
A small, deliberately narrow tool — built to solve one specific annoyance well, not to become everything a "timer app" could be.
The problem. Running a class, exam, or webinar usually means someone starts a timer on their own device and everyone else has to trust it — or starts a separate one, and the two drift apart within a minute. Video-call apps solve this for meetings; classroom timer sites solve it for a single projector. Nothing solved it for handing a whole room, or a call, one exact number that's the same on every screen, without installing anything. That's the gap CountLink closes.
The mechanism. CountLink writes the countdown's end time directly into the shared link, as a timestamp, instead of running a server that keeps every viewer in sync — which is how most shared-timer products work, and why they cap free-tier viewers. Every device that opens the link just checks its own clock against that timestamp. No server is involved after the link is generated, so there's nothing to keep running and no reason to charge more as more people open it. See How It Works for the technical walkthrough.
The trade-off, and the one exception to it. By default there's no ongoing connection, so nobody can push a live pause or an extra two minutes to everyone who already has the link open — the fix is starting a fresh countdown and re-sharing it. That rarely matters for a fixed-duration exam or class, since the length was already known. For the case where it does matter — a teacher running the board from the front of the room and wanting to adjust it without walking back to the laptop — there's now an opt-in phone control: check "Let me pause, adjust, or stop this from my phone" before starting, and you get a second link that does exactly that, live, on every screen that has the countdown open. It's the one place this site uses a small pub/sub relay rather than pure link-timestamp math — see the checkbox's own explanation on the setup panel, and the comparison page for how this compares to real-time competitors.
Why it's free. Showing the countdown to one extra viewer costs nothing, so there's no viewer cap, device cap, or paid tier gating basic features. That's a structural consequence of how the tool works, not a promotional discount.
Beyond the link. The same no-server mechanism also powers a few things that don't get much billing on the homepage: an embeddable overlay mode for OBS and stream browser sources (transparent background, no watermark), a QR code for the share link when typing a URL isn't practical, and an installable app — add CountLink to your home screen or dock from the browser's install prompt and it opens like a normal app, still with nothing synced through a server.
Who's behind it. CountLink is built and maintained independently, not as a funded startup with a growth roadmap. Questions, bug reports, or feature requests go straight to the person who maintains it, via the contact page.
What it's actually used for, so far. CountLink is young — this section will be honest about that rather than pretend otherwise. Looking at real visits to the live site over the last 90 days (bot and localhost testing traffic excluded, and the numbers below are genuinely small, so treat them as a rough shape rather than a survey): the single biggest use is the homepage timer itself, set directly rather than via a named page. Of the visits to a specific named timer, the order so far is roughly focus/interval timers (Pomodoro, interval), then classroom & exam use, then meetings and calls, then stream overlays, then one-off events. That roughly matches the order the tool was built to serve, for what it's worth. This paragraph will get updated as the sample gets big enough to say more than that.