Apps That Charge You Money to Stay Off Your Phone
Four apps currently charge you real money to unlock your phone or stay off it: Touch Grass bills you for skipping its go-outside ritual, Forfeit takes staked money when you fail a commitment, Beeminder charges when your tracked data crosses a line, and Paywall (ours, pre-launch) charges a price you set at the moment you open a blocked app early. You sign up for this voluntarily, and it's one of the better-evidenced ideas in habit software.
The pitch sounds like a joke — paying actual money for your own screen time — so this page maps the whole category: who's in it, how each one charges you, and why the mechanic outperforms the polite alternatives.
Why paying works when reminders don't
Every phone already ships with the polite version. iOS Screen Time will tell you you've hit your limit, and then offer you a button labeled "Ignore Limit," which is less a limit than a rhetorical question. Reminders, grayscale modes, and gentle nudges all share one property: ignoring them is free. And anything free gets consumed in bulk.
The evidence for attaching a cost is more solid than the category's novelty suggests. In a New England Journal of Medicine trial on smoking cessation (Halpern et al., 2015), participants who accepted a deposit contract — their own money, returned only on success — quit at rates about 13 percentage points higher than people in reward-only programs. Prizes are nice. The prospect of losing your own money is persuasive.
Even pure friction moves the needle: a 2023 PNAS study of the one sec app found that a simple forced pause before opening a target app cut openings by about 57%. The pay-to-unlock category takes that pause and puts a price tag on it. You can still get in — the door is never welded shut — but walking through costs something, and you have to watch yourself pay. For the full economics of why this works, see does putting money on the line break phone habits; for why the free approaches decay, see why app blockers don't work.
Which apps charge you money for screen time?
Four apps currently charge you real money in connection with your screen time, each with a different theory of when the charge should land.
Touch Grass — pay to skip the outdoors
Touch Grass (iOS) blocks your chosen apps until you go outside, physically touch grass, and prove it to your camera — computer vision checks the photo. The money enters when you'd rather not: you get one free skip, and after that skips cost money, with skip credits starting at $0.99. It's charge-per-skip: the default path is free but requires leaving the building; the paid path is for rain, laziness, or the eleventh floor. The company says half its revenue goes to tree planting and rewilding charities. Pick Touch Grass if you want your unlock ritual to involve daylight, and you find the absurdity motivating rather than annoying.
Forfeit — stake money on staying off
Forfeit (iOS, Android) is a general commitment app: you stake an amount on a task with a deadline, submit evidence — photo, video, GPS, health data — and a human adjudicator reviews it. Fail or skip the proof, and your stake is forfeited. Applied to screen time, that means staking money on a usage goal: on iOS, Forfeit reads Apple's Screen Time data and auto-verifies whether you stayed under your limit; on Android it blocks chosen apps during your goal windows. You pay only when you fail, which keeps quiet weeks free. Pick Forfeit if you want stakes on provable behavior and you respect a deadline more than a suggestion.
Beeminder — pay when the data says you slipped
Beeminder (web, iOS, Android) tracks a number you feed it — which can be screen-time data — against a commitment line. Cross the line and you're charged, starting at $5 and climbing a ladder with each derailment ($5, $10, $30, and up, with a cap you control) until it finds the number that stops you. The charge arrives after the fact, at settle-up, not at the moment your thumb hovers over Instagram. Pick Beeminder if you're a data person with several goals and you want one system for all of them. It's the strongest general tool in the category and the least surgical about the moment of temptation. More on the wider genus in commitment device apps.
Paywall — pay at the exact moment you cave
Paywall (joinpaywall.com) is our entry, and it moves the charge to the only moment that matters: right now, while you're standing at the door. You pick the apps that own you. Paywall walls them off using Apple's own Screen Time controls. Open one early and you hit a wall with a price on it — a price you chose in advance, floor of $0.50 (fines that are too small backfire; see the screen time tax page for the rate-setting logic), typically $1–2 per unlock. Pay it and you get a timed session; when the session ends the wall re-arms itself, like a parking meter that never forgets. A monthly cap keeps a bad week from becoming a bad month.
Where does the money go? To us. Yes, we keep it. We find this aligns incentives adequately: you want to stop paying us, and we want you to have to think about it.
Two honesty notes, because this category attracts inflated claims. First, every wall in Paywall also opens free after a delay you set when arming it — anywhere from 30 minutes to 24 hours — so the money is for now, not for ever. Second, no iOS blocker is impossible to bypass: any of these apps, ours included, can be deleted or have its permissions revoked. What you're buying is friction with a price on it at the moment of impulse, and honest vendors say so.
Paywall is iOS-only and pre-launch: the waitlist is open ahead of the App Store release.
The category at a glance
| App | When you pay | How much | Where it goes | Platforms |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Touch Grass | When you skip touching grass | Skip credits from $0.99 | Touch Grass (50% to rewilding charities, per the company) | iOS |
| Forfeit | When you fail a staked task | Your chosen stake | Forfeit | iOS, Android |
| Beeminder | When your data crosses the line | $5 escalating ladder, cappable | Beeminder | Web, iOS, Android |
| Paywall | The moment you unlock early | You set it; $0.50 floor, typically $1–2, monthly cap | Paywall | iOS (pre-launch) |
Which one should you pick?
- You want to be forced outside → Touch Grass. The grass is the product; the fee is the exit hatch.
- You want stakes on many kinds of goals, not just your phone → Beeminder for numbers, Forfeit for proof.
- Your specific failure is the reflexive open — lock screen to feed in two seconds → you want the charge at that exact second, which is the Paywall design.
Whichever you choose, the common principle holds: the app's job isn't to make scrolling impossible. It's to make the impulsive path cost more than the deliberate one, at the moment you're deciding. Everything else is bookkeeping.
FAQ
Is there an app that makes you pay for screen time? Yes — several. Touch Grass charges for skipping its go-outside ritual, Forfeit takes staked money when you fail a commitment, Beeminder charges when tracked data crosses your line, and Paywall (pre-launch, iOS) charges a per-unlock price you set at the moment you open a blocked app early.
Why would anyone pay money to avoid their own phone? Because free limits get ignored — iOS's own "Ignore Limit" button is one tap. Deposit-contract research in NEJM found meaningfully higher success when people's own money was on the line versus reward-only setups.
Do these apps keep the money? Beeminder and Forfeit keep derailment and forfeited stakes; Touch Grass keeps skip fees and says it donates half its revenue; Paywall keeps unlock fees. StickK-style apps route stakes to charities or friends instead — see commitment device apps for that model.
Can't I just delete the app instead of paying? Yes. Every screen-time tool on iOS can be deleted or stripped of permissions — any app claiming otherwise is overpromising. The design goal is that deleting takes longer than the impulse lasts, and costs you the setup you've built.
How much does the pay-per-unlock model cost per month? It depends entirely on how often you cave. In Paywall's case you set the per-unlock price ($0.50 minimum) and a monthly cap, so the worst case is a number you chose in advance.
Try Paywall
If you've read this far comparing prices for your own attention, you're already the target customer. Paywall blocks the apps you choose and charges you real money to open them early. Resisting is free.