About TimeMatch.me

TimeMatch.me is built and maintained by Lauri Hanski, an independent developer based in Finland. It is a one-person project rather than a company — which means there is no support department behind it, but also that every page here was written and checked by the person whose name is on it.

Why it exists

Working from Finland means most of the people I deal with are somewhere inconvenient: the US East Coast is seven hours behind, India is two and a half hours ahead, and Australia is far enough around the world that "tomorrow morning" needs clarifying. Existing converters answered the narrow question — what time is it there right now — but not the one I actually had, which was which hours do we both have free. So I built the tool I wanted: a timeline you drag, with daylight and darkness colour-coded in both places at once, so a workable meeting slot is something you see rather than something you calculate.

How the times are worked out

Every conversion on this site comes from the IANA time zone database — the same dataset operating systems use — via your browser's built-in Intl API. That matters because time zones are political rather than astronomical: countries change their offsets and their daylight saving rules with little notice, and a hand-written offset table goes stale the moment one of them does. Reading the live database instead means half-hour offsets like India's, zones that abandoned daylight saving such as Moscow and São Paulo, and the few weeks each year when the US has switched its clocks and Europe has not, are all handled without special cases.

How it is built

The site is a set of static HTML pages with no backend of any kind. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to go — all the arithmetic happens on your own device. There are no accounts, no tracking, and nothing to install. The written facts on each city-pair page (the overlapping working window, the next daylight saving change) are computed from the time zone database when the site is built and refreshed as the rules change; the interactive comparator at the top of every page is always live.

Corrections

If you spot a time that looks wrong, or a city pairing you would find useful, I would genuinely like to hear about it — time zone bugs are easy to introduce and hard to notice on your own. The address is on the contact page.