I stopped cubing around 2015. Life happened. The cubes went into a drawer, and I moved on to other things.

A few months ago I picked one up again. Scrambled it, solved it, felt that familiar rush. Within a week I was back in, watching reconstructions, learning new algs, chasing sub-20. But when I went looking for a timer, something felt off. The tools I remembered were still around, and some new ones had appeared, but nothing clicked. Some felt dated. Others were overloaded with features I did not need. A few had the right ideas but rough edges that made daily use annoying. I kept switching between three different timers and being mildly frustrated with all of them.

So I did what any developer would do. I opened a code editor and started building.

What PowerCubers is today

PowerCubers just launched. It is early, and I want to be upfront about that. This is an MVP, the foundation that everything else will be built on. But the foundation is solid, and here is what is already working:

A WCA-compliant timer. 15-second inspection, hold-to-start, +2 and DNF penalties. Scrambles for all 17 WCA events. The core loop works the way it should.

Guest mode and authenticated mode. You can use the timer without creating an account. Your solves stay in your browser (up to 25 per event). Sign up and everything moves to a database with no limits and full history.

Solve history with filters. Browse your solves by event, date range, labels, and tags. Edit penalties, delete solves, find what you need.

Labels and tags. This is one of the features I am most excited about, even if it seems simple on the surface. You can tag your solves with whatever context matters to you: the cube you were using, whether you were warming up or doing focused practice, your mood, the method you tried. Right now this is useful for personal filtering and analysis. Long term, it is the foundation for something much bigger (more on that below).

Stats. Personal bests, Ao5, Ao12, Ao100. Progression charts over time. Distribution histograms to see where your solves cluster. Event comparison to track how your different puzzles stack up against each other.

Daily Challenges. One scramble per event, per day, shared globally. One attempt. A leaderboard. Show up, solve, see where you stand. You need at least 15 solves in an event to participate, which keeps the leaderboard meaningful. This is already a social feature: you are competing against every other PowerCubers user, every day.

A dark, minimal UI. The timer is the center of everything. No clutter, no distractions. Built for someone who actually uses it.

Is this the most feature-rich timer out there? No. Other timers have been around for years and have had time to build up functionality that PowerCubers does not have yet. That is fine. We just started.

Why not just use csTimer?

Fair question. csTimer is solid. It has been around forever, it works, and it is free.

But csTimer was built in a different era of web development. The interface reflects that. If you are someone who cares about how your tools look and feel (and I am), there is a gap between what csTimer does functionally and the experience of using it daily.

That gap is what PowerCubers tries to fill. Not by having more features right now, but by being a timer that feels good to use. Snappy interactions, clean design, modern stack. The kind of tool where you open it and it just gets out of your way.

I am not trying to replace csTimer or any other timer. Different tools work for different people. I am building the one I wanted to find and could not.

Where this is going

PowerCubers is an MVP. The list of things I want to build is long. Here is some of what is coming:

Reports by labels. Remember those labels and tags? The plan is to build dedicated report pages where you can drill into your data by label. How do your times compare on your GAN vs your MoYu? How does focused practice compare to casual solves? Labels are the key to unlocking this kind of analysis without smart cubes.

Cross-user analytics by label. This is the long game. If enough cubers are tagging their solves consistently, we can start comparing data across the entire user base. Imagine seeing how your "CFOP" solves compare to the community average, or how "cold start" first solves of the day trend for everyone. Think of it as community-level insights built from individual data, opt-in and anonymized.

A Spotify Wrapped for speedcubing. Your year in cubing: total solves, best month, most improved event, your consistency trends, your Daily Challenge record. A shareable snapshot of your cubing year. I have no idea when this ships, but I think about it a lot.

Parties. Private or public rooms where a group of cubers share the same scramble and compete in real time. Like Daily Challenges, but on demand and with your friends.

Public profiles. Your PBs, your progression, your event spread. Something you could link in your WCA profile or a Reddit flair.

More practice modes. Drills, timed challenges for algorithm subsets, structured practice beyond "do another solve."

Better analytics. More charts, more metrics, more ways to slice your data. Not phase-level analysis (that needs smart cubes), but everything I can extract from timestamps, scrambles, penalties, and labels.

There is no fixed timeline for any of this. I ship things when they are ready. But this is the direction, and it is not slowing down.

The honest part about money

I am going to be transparent here because I think cubers deserve that.

I would love for PowerCubers to become my full-time thing. Not in a "let's raise venture capital and build a startup" way, but in a "I want to dedicate all my time to making the best possible tool for this community" way. If this project gets enough traction and I can make a living from it, I will. That is the dream.

Right now, there is no business model. No premium tier. No ads. No tracking. The only way to support the project is through Buy Me a Coffee. Servers cost money, domains cost money, and my time has a cost too.

Here is the deal: if the costs of running PowerCubers stay manageable, it stays free and open. But if the project grows and the infrastructure costs grow with it, I will need to figure out sustainability. That might mean usage limits on the free tier, or a paid plan with extra features, or something else entirely. I do not know yet because I am not there yet.

What I can promise is this: I will not lose money indefinitely for the sake of keeping everything free. That is not sustainable and it is not honest to pretend otherwise. But I will also not paywall basic functionality or squeeze users for revenue. If and when paid features come, they will be worth paying for.

This is day one

PowerCubers is not a finished product. It is the start of something that I think the cubing community needs: a modern, well-built platform made by someone who actually cubes and actually cares about getting the details right.

There is a lot to build. I know what is missing. I know other timers do things we do not do yet. The gap will close, and some of the ideas on the roadmap do not exist anywhere else.

If you are a cuber and any of this resonates, try it out. Use the timer, do a Daily Challenge, tag some solves. And if you have opinions about what PowerCubers should become, I want to hear them. This is not a company shipping features from a roadmap decided in a boardroom. It is one cuber building for other cubers, and the community's input shapes what comes next.

If you want to support the project while it is still early, Buy Me a Coffee is the way. Every contribution helps keep the servers running and the development moving.

Let's see where this goes.