Terms of use & legal notice

Last updated: July 2026

These terms cover the use of besttimers.com. They are deliberately short, because the site is free, requires no account and collects nothing.

Acceptance of these terms

By accessing or using besttimers.com you agree to these terms in full. If you do not agree with any part of them, please do not use the site. Continued use after a change to these terms constitutes acceptance of the revised version.

Who may use the site

The site is not directed at children under 13, and no part of it requires or invites a user to identify themselves. If you are under the age at which you can give consent for online services in your country — 13 in the United States, and between 13 and 16 depending on the member state in the European Union — you should use the site only with the involvement of a parent or guardian.

Legal notice

This site is published by a private individual on a non-commercial basis. French law allows such a publisher to withhold their address from public display, provided their identity has been given to the hosting provider — which is the case here. The publisher can be reached by email at any time, and the hosting provider holds the information required by law.

This notice is published to satisfy the identification requirements that apply to the publisher of an online service, including under French law where the publisher is established in France.

Your responsibility, and yours alone

This section is the most important one on this page. Please read it before using any timer.

You accept these terms by using the site

No registration, no click and no signature is required to use BestTimers, and none is needed for these terms to apply. Accessing any page of this site, and using any timer, stopwatch, sequence, game clock, metronome or calculator it offers, constitutes your full and unreserved acceptance of these terms. If you do not accept them, the only appropriate course of action is to close the page and not use the site.

You alone decide, and you alone are responsible

The publisher does not know what you are timing, why, or what depends on it. Those choices are yours, made without any instruction, advice or supervision from the publisher.

You are therefore solely and entirely responsible for:

• your decision to use this site rather than a dedicated device;
• your judgement as to whether this site is suitable for the task at hand;
• the settings you choose — duration, sound, volume, repetition;
• the condition of your own device, browser, power supply and internet connection;
• every consequence, direct or indirect, of a timer that did not run, did not sound, was not heard, or was not acted upon.

The publisher makes the tool available and nothing more. It assumes no obligation to supervise, remind, verify or guarantee anything whatsoever, and takes no part in the use you make of the site.

BestTimers is a free tool provided at no charge, with no account, no contract, and no commercial relationship between you and the publisher. It is offered on a best-efforts basis only.

A best-efforts undertaking, not a guaranteed result

The publisher undertakes to make reasonable efforts to keep the site working correctly. That is an undertaking as to means, not as to result. No result of any kind is guaranteed — not that a timer will sound, not that it will sound at the right moment, not that it will be audible, not that your data will survive, and not that the site will be reachable at any given time.

Where the site must never be your only safeguard

You must not rely on this site alone in any situation where a missed alarm could cause harm. That includes, without limitation: medication and medical treatment; supervision of a child, an elderly person or an animal; food safety; an oven, a hob or any heat source left unattended; examinations and timed assessments; legal or professional deadlines; industrial, laboratory or workshop processes; driving and transport; and any activity presenting a risk to a person, an animal or property.

In any of those situations, use a dedicated and reliable device, and add a second independent reminder. Choosing not to do so is your decision, and its consequences are yours.

Using the site

BestTimers is free to use, for personal or professional purposes, with no registration. You may link to it freely, including deep links to a specific timer.

You agree not to attempt to disrupt the service, to use automated means to overload it, or to redistribute it as your own product. Embedding the site in a frame on another website in a way that presents it as your own is not permitted.

No warranty

The site is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind. Every reasonable effort is made to keep the timers accurate, but browsers behave differently, background tabs can be throttled, notifications can be suppressed by the operating system, and audio can be blocked until you interact with the page.

Do not rely on this site as the sole safeguard for anything where a missed alarm would cause harm. That includes medication schedules, food safety, professional deadlines, examinations, and any situation involving risk to people or property. Use a dedicated device or a second reminder for those.

Alarms, sound and hearing

The alarms are generated by your browser and played through your device at whatever volume it is set to. Some of the available sounds — the siren and the urgent beep in particular — are deliberately loud and abrupt. Set your volume to a comfortable level before starting a timer, especially when using headphones, and do not use this site in any way that could startle someone in a situation where being startled is dangerous.

Sound may be blocked entirely by your browser until you interact with the page, may be delayed while the tab is in the background, and may not play at all if your device is muted or in a low-power mode. None of these behaviors is under the publisher's control.

Loss of stored data

Anything the site saves — timers, sequence programs, history, preferences — is stored only in your own browser. It can be erased at any time by you, by your browser, by private browsing mode, by clearing your site data, by a device reset, or by the browser reclaiming storage space. No data on this site should be treated as a permanent or backed-up record. The publisher cannot recover it and accepts no liability for its loss.

Software defects and accuracy

Like all software, this site may contain defects. It is written and tested with care, but no program of any size is free of them, and a browser is not a controlled environment.

The publisher gives no warranty that the timers, calculators or any other tool on this site are, or will remain, accurate, reliable, complete or error-free. In particular, and without limitation, any of the following may occur:

• a timer may drift, run fast or slow, stop early, overrun, or fail to trigger at all;
• a countdown may display an incorrect value, or a value that does not match the alarm it eventually produces;
• the metronome may lose its tempo, and the stopwatch may report an inaccurate elapsed time;
• a calculation — a sleep cycle, an interval, a sequence step — may be wrong;
• a preset duration or a reference figure published on the site may be inaccurate, outdated, or simply unsuitable for your situation;
• an update to your browser or operating system, an extension, an unusual configuration, or an interaction the publisher could not anticipate may break a feature that previously worked;
• a change made to the site itself may introduce a defect that had not been detected before release.

The publisher will make reasonable efforts to correct defects that are reported, but undertakes no obligation to detect them, to correct them within any particular time, or to correct them at all, and gives no undertaking as to continuity of service.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither the site nor its publisher can be held liable for any defect, inaccuracy, malfunction, interruption or unexpected behavior, nor for any consequence of one. The remedy available to you, and the only one, is to stop using the site.

If you notice something that looks wrong, please report it — it is genuinely useful, and it is the fastest way to get it fixed.

Intended use: personal and domestic only

This section defines what BestTimers is for. Anything outside it falls outside the intended purpose of the site and is expressly excluded.

What the site is designed for

BestTimers is designed for personal, domestic and recreational use: cooking at home, timing a workout, structuring a study session, practicing an instrument, taking a break, planning a night's sleep. That is the whole of its intended purpose.

What it is not designed for

The site has not been designed, developed, tested, validated or certified for professional, medical or safety-critical use. It carries no certification, no conformity assessment, no quality assurance process and no service-level guarantee of any kind. It is a free personal project, not an instrument.

Its use is expressly excluded in the following contexts, among others:

• Medical and care. Administering or timing medication, monitoring a patient, timing a clinical procedure or examination, supervising a person who is ill, elderly, disabled or dependent, or any use in a hospital, surgery, pharmacy, laboratory or care home. BestTimers is not a medical device within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/745, makes no medical claim, and must never be used as one.
• Professional and commercial. Any activity carried out for remuneration or in a professional capacity where timing affects a service delivered, a product made, an invoice raised, or a contractual obligation.
• Industrial and technical. Production processes, machine cycles, chemical or laboratory procedures, maintenance operations, or anything where a timing error could damage equipment or endanger a person.
• Safety and emergency. Fire safety, first aid, diving, climbing, rescue operations, security rounds, or any activity where a person's safety depends on a duration being respected.
• Transport. Driving, piloting, navigation, or the timing of any journey where an error carries risk.
• Legal and judicial. Procedural deadlines, statutory limitation periods, contractual notice periods, or any duration having legal effect.
• Official assessment. Examinations, competitions, official sporting events, or any timed test whose result is recorded or contested.
• Food safety. Pasteurisation, sterilisation, cold-chain control, or any cooking time on which food safety — rather than taste — depends.

The consequence

If you use this site in any of those contexts, you do so entirely outside its intended purpose, entirely on your own initiative, and entirely at your own risk. The publisher excludes all liability for such use, to the fullest extent permitted by law, and the fact that the site did not technically prevent you from doing so creates no obligation and no acceptance of responsibility on the publisher's part.

In every one of those situations, use equipment designed, certified and maintained for the purpose.

Not professional advice

Nothing on this site constitutes medical, financial, legal, nutritional or professional advice.

• The cooking times are common starting points, not food-safety guidance. Follow the instructions on your packaging and recognized food-safety standards.
• The workout presets are generic templates. If you have a health condition or are new to intense exercise, consult a professional first.
• The sleep cycle calculator applies a simple 90-minute average. It does not diagnose anything, and persistent sleep problems deserve a doctor rather than a calculator.

Your responsibilities

You agree to use the site lawfully and not to:

• interfere with its operation, security or availability, or attempt to do so;
• access it through automated means at a rate that places an unreasonable load on the service;
• copy, mirror, resell or republish it, in whole or in substantial part, as your own product;
• embed it in a frame or wrapper that presents it as belonging to someone else;
• use it in any context where a missed, delayed or silent alarm could endanger a person, damage property, or breach a legal or professional obligation.

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless the publisher against any claim, loss, liability or expense arising from your breach of these terms or from your use of the site in a manner it expressly warns against.

Third parties

Typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google's servers; this is covered in the privacy policy. If advertising is enabled on the site, advertisements are supplied by third-party networks and their content is not selected, endorsed or controlled by the publisher.

Any link from this site to an external website is provided for convenience only. The publisher does not control those sites, is not responsible for their content, availability, or privacy practices, and a link does not imply endorsement.

Access and suspension

The publisher may restrict or withdraw access to the site, in whole or in part, at any time and without notice, including where use appears to breach these terms or to threaten the stability of the service.

What the publisher does not control

BestTimers runs entirely inside your browser, on your device. It has no server of its own that keeps counting on your behalf, and it cannot reach you by any other means. That has a direct consequence: a timer only exists for as long as your device, your browser and your power supply allow it to.

The publisher has no control over, and accepts no liability for, any of the following:

• Your internet connection. The page loads once and then works offline, but a connection failure while loading, or while fetching fonts, may leave the page incomplete.
• Your power supply. A flat battery, an unplugged laptop or a power cut stops everything. Nothing is resumed automatically unless you reopen the page.
• Your device. A crash, a freeze, a forced restart, a system update, or a device that goes to sleep, hibernates or overheats.
• Your browser. A crashed browser, a tab you closed, a tab discarded by the browser to free memory, private browsing that discards storage on exit, or an extension that interferes with the page.
• Your operating system. Silent mode, do-not-disturb, focus modes, battery saver, background-tab throttling, and permission prompts that block sound or notifications.
• Volume and output. A muted device, disconnected headphones, or a Bluetooth speaker that dropped its connection.

Several of these are outside anyone's control, including yours. That is precisely why the site should never be the only thing standing between you and a consequence that matters.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, the publisher shall not be liable, on any basis whatsoever — contractual, tortious or otherwise — for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential or special loss or damage arising from, or in connection with, the use of or inability to use this site. That includes, without limitation:

• a timer that failed to sound, sounded late, or sounded silently;
• an alarm that was not heard, was suppressed by the operating system, or was missed;
• data stored in your browser that was lost, cleared or corrupted;
• any decision taken in reliance on a cooking time, workout template, sleep suggestion, game clock or market signal presented on the site;
• interruption, unavailability, or discontinuation of the service;
• any defect, bug, miscalculation or inaccuracy in the site, whether or not it was known to the publisher and whether or not it had been reported;
• any failure of your own device, browser, operating system, power supply or internet connection, including a tab that was closed, discarded or throttled;
• any consequence of your decision to use this site for a task where a missed alarm mattered;
• any use of the site outside its intended personal and domestic purpose, in particular any professional, medical, industrial or safety-related use.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid to access the site, which is zero.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability where the law does not allow it — in particular for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for any statutory rights you hold as a consumer. In the European Union and the United Kingdom especially, mandatory consumer protections apply regardless of what a website's terms say.

Force majeure

The publisher is not liable for any failure or delay caused by an event beyond its reasonable control, including but not limited to: a failure of the hosting provider, a network or internet outage, a power cut, a cyber-attack, a fire or natural disaster, a defect in a third-party service or browser, a change in the law, or any other event of force majeure within the meaning of Article 1218 of the French Civil Code.

Intellectual property

The design, text, source code and interface of BestTimers belong to the publisher. You are welcome to use the tool and to link to it; copying the site to republish it elsewhere is not permitted.

Typefaces are provided by Google Fonts under their respective open licenses. Brand names mentioned on the site — such as Tabata or CrossFit — belong to their respective owners and are used only to describe what a timer is for. BestTimers is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them.

Text and data mining, and AI training

The publisher expressly reserves all rights over the content of this site for the purposes of text and data mining, within the meaning of Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, and of Article L.122-5-3 of the French Intellectual Property Code.

The reproduction, extraction or reuse of this content for the purpose of training, fine-tuning or evaluating an artificial intelligence model, or for building a dataset intended for that purpose, is prohibited without prior written authorisation. This reservation is also expressed in machine-readable form in the site's robots.txt file.

Availability and changes

The site may be modified, interrupted or discontinued at any time without notice. Features may be added or removed. These terms may change; the date at the top of this page indicates the current version.

General

Severability. If any provision of these terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, that provision is to be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions continue in full force.

No waiver. A failure to enforce any provision of these terms is not a waiver of the right to enforce it later.

Entire agreement. These terms, together with the privacy policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and the publisher regarding the use of this site.

Evidence. The parties agree that computer records held by the publisher and its hosting provider — server logs in particular — constitute admissible evidence of connections and of the use of the site, and may be relied upon as such in the event of a dispute.

Language. These terms are written in English. Any translation is provided for convenience, and the English version prevails in the event of a discrepancy.

Assignment. The publisher may transfer its rights and obligations under these terms, for example if the site is sold. Your rights under applicable consumer law are unaffected.

Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or with the use of this site, are governed by French law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules.

The courts of Soissons (Aisne, 02), France, shall have sole jurisdiction over any dispute relating to these terms, to the site, or to its use — including disputes concerning the validity, interpretation, performance or termination of these terms, and including in the event of multiple defendants, an interim application, or third-party proceedings.

Before bringing any claim, you agree to contact the publisher first so that a resolution may be sought amicably. Most issues can be settled that way, and it costs nothing to try.

One limit, stated honestly rather than buried: if you are a consumer, European and French law give you rights that a jurisdiction clause cannot remove. Under Regulation (EU) 1215/2012 you may bring proceedings before the courts of your own place of residence, and you may only be sued there. Nothing above is intended to deprive you of that right, of your right of access to a court, or of any other mandatory protection that applies where you live. For any user who is not a consumer — a business, a professional, an organization — the clause above applies in full.

Contact

For anything relating to these terms: contact@besttimers.com or the contact page.

This page is a clear, good-faith statement of terms, not legal advice. Have it reviewed by a qualified professional if the site becomes a commercial activity.