Focus with purpose
Your attention is
the most generous
thing you own.
Every time you reach for a distracting app, something small but real is lost. Giveback makes that moment visible and turns it into something that matters.
Today
3 apps blocked
YouTube · 23 min remaining
We all know the feeling
We don't pick up our phones with bad intentions. We pick them up because our environment makes it easier to reach than to resist. Giveback changes the environment.
How it works
Three Moments
01
Choose your walls
Open Giveback and select the apps you want to keep at arm's length. Not delete. Not shame yourself about. Just put behind a door. Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, news apps, whatever pulls you under. Your iPhone's Screen Time system locks them at the OS level, so no workaround feels easy enough to bother.
02
Unlock with intention
When you genuinely need access, tap Unlock. You'll choose a duration, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, and you'll know that this moment is being counted. Not punished. Just seen. The unlock timer runs, and when it ends, the wall goes back up automatically.
03
Every unlock becomes a contribution
Here's the part that changes things: each unlock is logged, and a portion of your Giveback subscription is allocated to causes you care about. You're not just managing your attention, you're redirecting its cost somewhere meaningful. Your receipt arrives monthly.
Real stories
People Like You
"I used to open Twitter before my feet hit the floor in the morning. I told myself it was staying informed. Giveback made me realise I was actually just delaying the day. Three months in, I've read six books. I didn't find extra time, I just stopped leaking it."
"The giving angle was what got me to actually keep using it. Every month I get a little receipt, last month it was $4.20 to a mental health charity. That sounds small, but it means my bad habit is doing something. It's accountability that doesn't feel like punishment."
"I blocked YouTube during school hours mostly as a joke to myself. But after two weeks I noticed I was actually present in my prep periods. My lesson plans got better. I don't know how to explain the math on that but it happened."
"My screen time was 7 hours a day. I was embarrassed every time I saw the notification. Giveback was the first app that didn't make me feel broken for it, it just made it harder to do without noticing. Down to about 3 hours now. Still a lot, I know."
"My patients tell me they can't stop scrolling. I used to not have a good answer. Now I tell them what I use. The Screen Time integration means it's not an app fighting an app, it's the phone itself doing the blocking. That matters."
Why friction works
The Science
Behavioural science has a name for what Giveback does: it adds friction. When the cost of an action increases, even slightly, the likelihood of the action drops significantly. BJ Fogg's research at Stanford on habit formation shows that the environment, not willpower, is the primary driver of behaviour.
Giveback doesn't ask you to be a different person. It asks your phone to be a different environment.
The giving component works on a separate mechanism: accountability with dignity. Unlike screen time shaming, a daily notification that says you spent 5 hours on your phone, Giveback takes the energy of the unlock moment and channels it outward. You still unlocked. But it meant something.
The mission
We are not a screen time company.
Giveback started from a single frustration: every focus tool we tried either used shame, or surveillance, or mechanics that became their own addiction. None of them answered the question we actually had, what is all this distraction costing, and where does that cost go?
We built Giveback to close that loop. The cost of your attention is real. When it's spent on algorithmic feeds, it returns nothing. When it's redirected, even partially, it can return something tangible.
We are a small team. We don't take advertising revenue. We don't sell your data. We make money when you subscribe, and we give a portion of every subscription to causes our users choose. That's the whole business model.
"I missed my daughter's first word because I was scrolling. That's when we started building."
"I studied behavioural economics for six years. I built Giveback because I wanted to use that knowledge for something good."
Pricing
Choose your pace
Free tier
Aware
- Block up to 3 apps
- Unlimited unlocks
- Basic session timer
- No giving component
- Free, forever
$6.99/month or $49/year
Giveback
- Block unlimited apps
- Unlock sessions with custom durations
- Monthly giving receipt
- Choose your cause
- Priority support
- Usage insights (coming soon)
A portion of every premium subscription goes directly to charitable causes. You choose the category at signup.
The giving causes
Where it goes
Mental Health
Children's Education
Climate & Environment
Food Security
Animal Welfare
Refugee Support
Indigenous Communities
Open Source Technology
You allocate your giving at signup and can change it any time. Every month, you receive a transparent receipt showing exactly where your contribution went and a link to the organisation's public accounts.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Giveback uses Apple's Family Controls API, the same system used for parental controls. It operates at the operating system level, not the app level. There is no in-app bypass. The only way to remove a block is through Giveback itself or through your iPhone's Screen Time settings.
A fixed percentage of your subscription fee is pooled monthly and distributed to registered charitable organisations in your chosen category. You receive a PDF receipt with the organisation name, registered charity number, and amount. We are working toward publishing annual giving reports publicly.
Giveback uses Apple's native DeviceActivity framework to apply and monitor restrictions. This runs at the system level, not as a background process in our app. Battery impact is negligible.
If you cancel, your premium subscription remains active until the end of the paid period. After that, your account reverts to the free tier and the three most recently added blocked apps are retained. Blocks remain in place until you manually remove them.
Giveback does not collect or store which apps you block, your usage patterns, or your giving choices on our servers. All data lives in your iCloud-linked Screen Time profile and your device's local storage. The only data we hold is your account email, subscription status, and aggregated monthly giving totals.
Screen Time access is required to set restrictions at the OS level. Without it, Giveback would only be able to remind you, not block. We request the minimum permissions necessary and these are scoped to your own device only, not to any family group.
One download
Start with one app.
See what comes back.
Giveback is free to try. No credit card. No shame.