Why ScreenLeash exists

The problem

You've tried screen time limits. You've tried app blockers. You've tried putting your phone in another room. And it worked — for a while. Then you overrode the limit, uninstalled the blocker, or walked to the other room.

The fundamental issue is that these tools rely on your willpower to respect the boundary. But willpower is exactly what's failing you in the moment you need it most. You need a tool that doesn't ask for your permission — it just charges you.

Openly inspired by Beeminder

We want to be completely transparent: ScreenLeash is directly inspired by Beeminder. Beeminder pioneered the idea of putting real money on the line to keep yourself honest. Their “Yellow Brick Road” — a cumulative graph with a boundary you must stay on the right side of — is genuinely brilliant. We adopted their core concepts: cumulative tracking, escalating penalties, the akrasia horizon, and rerailing with respite.

But Beeminder is designed as a general-purpose commitment device. You manually enter data — steps walked, pages written, hours studied. For screen time, manual entry doesn't work. You can't honestly self-report how many minutes you spent on YouTube while you're in the middle of a binge. Screen time requires automatic, real-time tracking.

That single difference — automatic vs. manual — cascades into a series of design decisions that make ScreenLeash a fundamentally different product:

• •Deferred respite: In Beeminder, respite is immediate because you enter data after the fact. In ScreenLeash, usage is tracked continuously — if we gave respite immediately, you'd burn through it during the same binge session. So we defer it to the next day.
• •Continuous penalty: Beeminder charges once per derailment. But with real-time tracking, a “derailment” can last hours. ScreenLeash fires breaches at a configurable interval during a binge — you can't just eat the one penalty and keep going.
• •Cooldown allowance: After each breach, the ceiling jumps by the cooldown amount, synchronized with a timer — giving you exactly that much breathing room before the next charge fires.

We stand on Beeminder's shoulders and we say so openly. If Beeminder fits your use case better — especially for non-screen-time goals — we encourage you to use it. ScreenLeash exists because screen time is a specific, thorny problem that needed a specific solution.

50% of every penalty is donated

This is not a marketing gimmick. It's a structural commitment baked into how ScreenLeash operates. Of every rupee charged as a penalty, half goes to us (to keep the servers running, pay for the payment gateway, and sustain development) and half is pooled for charitable donation.

We publish transparency reports showing exactly how much was collected and how much was donated. The donation pool is distributed to a rotating set of effective, non-controversial charitable organizations.

Why you can't choose the charity

This is the question we get asked most, and the answer is central to how ScreenLeash works.

Imagine you set a screen time limit and choose your favorite animal shelter as the recipient. You breach the limit and get charged ₹200. How do you feel? Probably not that bad. “Well, at least those puppies are getting fed.” The penalty just became a feel-good donation. The sting is gone. The deterrent is destroyed.

The whole point of a financial commitment device is that you don't want to pay. If the money goes somewhere you care about, you've just created a backdoor for your brain to rationalize failure. “It's fine, it's going to a good cause.” It's not fine. You failed to meet your own commitment.

By choosing the charities ourselves, we ensure the penalty retains its bite. You lose the money. It goes somewhere good. But you don't get the emotional satisfaction of having chosen where.

Why no anti-charity option

Some commitment platforms take the opposite approach: they let you send your penalty money to a cause you oppose — a political party you disagree with, an organization whose values clash with yours. The idea is that the fear of funding your enemy is a stronger deterrent than a regular penalty.

We considered this and decided against it. Here's why:

• •It's ethically questionable: We would be building a pipeline that actively funds organizations people consider harmful. Even if it's the user's choice, we don't want our infrastructure facilitating that.
• •It introduces moral hazard: If you breach and your money goes to a cause you despise, you've inadvertently caused harm in the world. A self-improvement tool should not have collateral damage.
• •The regular penalty is sufficient: Our escalating penalty system — which doubles with every breach and never resets — is already a powerful deterrent. You don't need the extra psychological weight of anti-charity; you just need to lose enough money.

We believe that a clean, honest penalty — money lost, half donated to neutral good causes — is both effective and ethical. No games, no tricks, no moral complications.

Breaches are a signal, not just a punishment

Here's something most people miss: breaching isn't just a failure — it's feedback. The system is telling you something about how well your goals match your actual behavior.

The right goal setting looks like this: most days, you're comfortably below the ceiling with some banked buffer. Occasionally, on a bad day, you dip into that buffer. Rarely, you breach — and the penalty reminds you to course-correct. If that's not your experience, your goals need adjustment, not more willpower.

Think of it like a thermostat, not a whip. You set the temperature (your rate), and the system nudges you when you drift. If you're always drifting, the temperature is set wrong. Adjust it — just know that the adjustment takes 7 days to apply, so you can't do it in a moment of weakness.

Why changes take 7 days

Every change to your goal settings — rate, respite, penalty amount, cap — takes exactly 7 days to go into effect. This is not a technical limitation. It's the most important feature in the entire system.

Here's the scenario it prevents: It's 11 PM. You've been scrolling Instagram for two hours. You're about to breach. In a panic, you open the settings and double your daily rate. Crisis averted — except you just gutted your own commitment. Tomorrow, with a clear head, you'll regret it. But the damage is done.

The 7-day delay makes that impossible. You can schedule the change right now, sure — but it won't save you tonight. By the time it takes effect next week, you'll have had seven days to decide if you actually want it. Most of the time, you'll cancel it the next morning.

This is called the akrasia horizon, borrowed from Beeminder. “Akrasia” — the Greek word for weakness of will, acting against your own better judgment. The horizon is the distance between your present self and the future self who must live with your decisions. Seven days is long enough to separate impulse from intention.

• •New goals are immediate: Creating a goal is adding commitment, not weakening it, so there's no need for a delay.
• •Deletion is also delayed: You can't rage-quit a goal at midnight. It takes 7 days to delete, giving you time to reconsider.
• •You can cancel pending changes: Changed your mind? Cancel the scheduled change anytime before it takes effect. No harm done.

Our philosophy