How much do app blockers cost, once you count three years of them?

Ask how much do app blockers cost and you get a first answer that is almost useless: it depends on the plan, the platform and whether there is hardware involved. The useful version of the question has a time frame in it. A habit tool is not something you use for six weeks. If it works, you keep it for years, and years are where subscriptions and one-off purchases swap places.

Everything here was checked in August 2026 on the maker's own site or App Store listing. Prices in dollars are quoted in dollars and prices in euros in euros — we are not converting anything, because exchange rates move and a number we cannot stand behind is worse than no number at all.

Year one: the bill that looks reasonable

In the first twelve months almost everything looks affordable, which is exactly the problem with judging it there.

These are the annual prices as listed, checked August 2026:

Read that column and the devices look like the expensive option. Brick at $59 costs three times one sec's first year. Monk at €54.95 costs more than most apps you have ever bought. That is a real comparison and we are not going to hide it: if you want the cheapest possible first year, a device is not it.

The three-year bill, which is the one that matters

Over three years the same list reorders itself completely: $59.97 for one sec, $59 for Brick, €54.95 for Monk, and $299.97 for Opal on the annual plan.

Nothing clever is happening here. It is the annual price multiplied by three, and one-off prices staying where they were.

The row worth staring at is the monthly one. Paying month to month for the same product costs $719.64 over three years instead of $299.97 — the price of convenience, charged in small enough slices that nobody adds them up. Every subscription in this category is priced with that arithmetic in mind, which is why the annual plan is always the one presented in bold.

Two honest caveats about the table. Prices move, and the ones above are a snapshot: when we checked, Brick was listing at $59 with a promotional price of $50.15 on the page, and Opal, one sec and Opal's Lifetime tier all exist alongside plans we have not listed. And the totals ignore the thing that actually decides the cost, which is whether you are still using the tool in year three at all.

The free options are not a consolation prize

Three tools cost nothing, and one of them gives you the physical mechanism for the price of a pack of NFC tags.

Apple Screen Time is already on your phone and costs nothing. If you have never set a limit, set one before spending anything. Plenty of people need nothing more, and the ones who do need more will find out within a week, usually at the moment they tap "Ignore Limit" without thinking.

ScreenZen is free, donation supported, and rated 4.9 from around 48,000 ratings on the US App Store. It adds pauses and friction rather than hard walls, and for a lot of people that is the right dose.

Foqos is free, open source under the MIT licence, and it uses the same idea the paid devices sell: block your apps, then make a physical NFC tag the only comfortable way back in. It needs iOS 17.6 or later and a handful of blank tags. If you are curious whether the physical approach works on you, this is the cheapest possible way to find out, and we say so in our Monk versus Foqos comparison despite selling the paid one.

Hardware plus a subscription: the hybrid model

Unpluq sells a $30 tag that stops working if you stop paying.

Unpluq's product page lists the tag at $30 and states that the app is required if you buy it, with subscription lengths of three, six and twelve months. The page does not publish the price of those plans, so we are not going to put a number on it — check it in their own checkout before you buy.

The model is what matters more than the figure. In a hybrid, the object in your hand is a key to a service, and the service is the part you are renting. Stop paying and you own a plastic tag. That is a legitimate way to build a company and it funds continuous development, but it is a different purchase from a device that keeps working whether or not the company sends you another invoice.

One payment, then nothing

Brick lists at $59, Monk at €54.95. Both include the app for life, neither has a premium tier.

Brick is an NFC tile: one payment, free lifetime app access on Android and iOS, and it works with Android 12 or later and iPhones on iOS 17 or later. It is the physical blocker that already ships to most of Europe and North America, and if you are reading this outside Spain it is the one that can reach you today. Longer version in our Brick review.

Monk is a magnetic NFC disc made in Spain: €54.95 including VAT, paid once, app included, updates for life, no premium plan and nothing to renew. Two discs are €89 and three are €119. Its mechanism is the strictest on this list — to reopen a blocked app you scan the disc, always, with no soft unlock in the app — no ignore button, no code to type — and three finite emergency unlocks for genuine emergencies. It is iPhone only, iOS 16.2 or later, and it currently ships within Spain. We would rather write that plainly than take an order we cannot fulfil.

One thing neither device can honestly promise: an unbreakable block. On iOS there is no such thing, for anyone. What a device changes is that the way around it stops being a reflex and starts being a decision, and that gap is the entire argument for hardware.

When the subscription is the right buy

If you are not sure this is a permanent part of your life, renting it is the cheaper mistake.

We sell a one-payment device, so here is the case against ourselves. If you try a blocker for four months and drop it, one sec at $19.99 for the year cost you less than any device on this page. If your distraction lives on a laptop as much as a phone, a subscription app covers both and a disc covers one. If you want the data, the trends and the weekly report, subscriptions pay for people to keep building that, and one-off hardware does not. And a subscription is easy to leave, which is worth something on a purchase you are unsure about.

The subscription becomes a bad deal at one specific point: when you already know you need this permanently. Year four of a $99.99 plan buys you the same block you had in year one, and by then you have paid more than five times the price of a disc that never asked again. That is the whole case for buying the barrier outright.

Three questions that settle it faster than a table

Price is the last question, not the first. Answer these three and the shortlist writes itself.

1. Do you need to see the problem, or stop it? If you do not know where your hours go, pay for data and nudges — Opal is the best of that group. If you already know exactly where they go and walk past your own limits anyway, more data is a more expensive way to keep losing.
2. Has software already failed on you? Every blocking app depends on a permission you can revoke from Settings in seconds. If you have already done that once, you will do it again, and the honest fix is a key that does not live inside the phone.
3. How long do you expect to need this? Under a year, subscribe or use one of the free tools. Longer than that, do the multiplication before you tap the paywall.

If you want the field ranked rather than priced, we keep a comparison of app blockers for iPhone, from free to physical, with the ceiling of each one written down.

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