No jokes on this page

The honest page

Everywhere else we play a character. Here we don't. This is how the money actually works, written the way we'd want it explained to us.

What Paywall is

Paywall is an iOS app that blocks apps you choose (Instagram, TikTok, games — anything) using Apple's own Screen Time controls. You block them because you asked to. When you try to open a blocked app, you hit a wall with two ways through it.

The two ways through the wall

• Wait. Every wall opens free after a delay you set when you armed it. This option always exists, on every wall, every time, and it never depends on your balance or subscription state. It is not hidden and never will be.
• Pay. If you don't want to wait, you can open the app immediately for a price you set yourself in advance — minimum $1 per unlock. Each unlock is its own one-time purchase made through Apple's payment system at that moment (there is no balance to top up and nothing to pre-buy), and we keep it. That is the entire point: the fee only changes your behavior if it actually costs you something.

The prices, precisely

• You set the price per unlock when arming a wall. The floor is $1 — research on fines says amounts that feel trivial backfire. Prices sit on a fixed ladder ($1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89); every rung is a separate product in the App Store, so the receipt Apple sends you says exactly what you paid.
• Surge is on by default and is yours to switch off while the wall is down: each further paid unlock on the same day costs the next rung above your base ($1 → $1 → $2 → $3 → $5 → $8 …). The ladder resets at midnight. The price you will pay is shown on the wall itself and on the confirmation screen before any purchase.
• You set a weekly cap from the same ladder (default $21). Once you hit it, you cannot spend more that week, no matter what — only waiting works. This is deliberate: the app should sting, not harm.
• Every price is shown before you confirm. There are no surprise charges, no price changes mid-wall, no fees you didn't configure yourself.
• The first week after you install the app is free: no subscription, no card, no trial to sign up for. After that, putting a wall up needs Pro — $29.99 a year or $4.99 a month, as a standard Apple subscription (Apple shows your local price before you confirm). Unlock fees are separate and optional; a wall that is already up never falls because the subscription ended.
• We do not sell unlock credits, packs or bundles, and we will not. A discount on weakness would defeat the product. You pay for one unlock, once, when you decide to.

Refunds

Design-intended unlock fees are not refundable — a refundable fee wouldn't work as a commitment device, and we say so up front. But nobody should ever lose money to a technicality: if a charge happens because of a bug, a sync error, a crash, or anything else that wasn't your own decision to unlock, we refund it, no argument. If you think a charge was wrong, email us and we'll assume you're right.

Cancellation

The subscription is a standard Apple subscription: cancel any time in your iPhone's subscription settings, in the usual place, with the usual two taps. Cancelling disarms future walls; it never traps you behind an existing one — the free wait works regardless.

What we do with your data

The app collects nothing: no account, no analytics, no network calls of its own. The website counts page views in aggregate without cookies. What stays on your phone and how Apple handles the money is spelled out on the privacy page.

Who is behind this

One person with a phone problem, building the tool they needed. Not a lab, not a growth team. If something's wrong, the person reading your email is the person who wrote the code: founder@joinpaywall.com.