EMRALD sits inside the tools you already run. Right now there are two ways to do that: a live extension for Toggl, and the Obsidian plugin.
If you use Toggl to plan and bill, its dashboards tell you your capacity, whether a project is on budget, which hours you can invoice. What they don't tell you is what those billable hours took out of you. A day that looks perfect on a Toggl report, on schedule, fully billable, can still be the day that wrecks the rest of your week, and nothing in Toggl is built to catch that.
The EMRALD extension for Toggl puts the missing piece right where you're already working. When you stop a tracked Toggl session, EMRALD asks you five short questions, about ten to fifteen seconds, and rates the effort against one of four built-in levels. No new app to open, no separate timer to remember. You keep billing and planning in Toggl. EMRALD quietly builds a personally calibrated record of what those billable hours actually cost you, session by session, week by week.
The extension's Trends view puts the combined numbers on a graph, right in the popup: how much of your tracked time is billable, what a point of your effort earns, how heavy this week is against your normal. The receipts feed the graphs. The graphs tell you what the receipts have been adding up to.
Toggl's own product copy talks about spotting problems "before deadlines slip or burnout hits." That's a real risk they name honestly. What they don't have is a way to measure it. That's the gap this extension exists to close: two ledgers, running side by side, one for the invoice and one for you.
Setup is four steps. Create a free EMRALD account on the web app. Link it to Toggl with your Toggl API key. Import the projects you want tracked, and only those: you decide exactly what EMRALD tracks. Then install the extension and run Toggl the way you already do. The receipt shows up after your next tracked session.
The Toggl integration lives entirely on the web platform, and is executed through the web app and the extension. It doesn't touch EMRALD's Obsidian plugin and doesn't need it.
Install the EMRALD for Toggl extension from the Chrome Web Store.
See the full comparison on the EMRALD vs Toggl page.
The Obsidian plugin is where EMRALD started, and it's still the fullest integration of the product. You create a project inside your vault, give it an effort level, start a session, do your work, then stop it. The same five-question effort receipt runs right there in the sidebar, no browser tab, no separate account screen to juggle. Over time it builds the same calibrated model: what your work is actually costing you, broken down by project, by day/week/month, and by effort level.
The plugin is MIT-licensed and open source. That's not a marketing line, it means you can open the code and read exactly what runs in your vault, because I built it that way on purpose. The plugin only ever touches session data: how long you worked, what level you set, how the receipt came back. It never reads your notes and never needs to.
Free tier covers core tracking, eight of the twenty metrics, and the Burnout Monitor, which runs identically whether you pay or not. Pro adds the rest of the metrics, custom effort levels, and the full insight engine, for $5 a month or $42 a year.
Install it from the Obsidian community plugin directory, search "EMRALD," and you're tracking your first session in under a minute.
Integrations get built when enough people ask for them. Tell us which tool you want EMRALD inside next: support@effortmastery.com.
