You have five App Store tabs open, every one of them says Free, and you want to know which one is still going to be standing between you and Instagram three weeks from now.
The word is doing different work in each of them. Some apps give you the whole mechanism and simply give you less of it, one rule instead of five. Others give you a demonstration of the mechanism and charge for the part that actually holds. Those two things look identical on the App Store page and they behave nothing alike on the fourth evening, which is the only evening that matters.
Every free tier is holding back one of four things
Name which one, and the shortlist sorts itself in about a minute per app.
- Count. You get one rule, or three blocked apps, or one session a day. The mechanism is whole, there is just less of it. This is the honest trade.
- Strength. You get a version you can dismiss and they sell you the version you cannot. The free tier is a demo of a wall, shaped like a wall, made of paper.
- Coverage. It guards this iPhone. Your iPad, your laptop and your browser cost money.
- Sight. Blocking is free, knowing what happened is not. History, streaks and weekly reports go behind the wall.
Count and coverage are fair trades. Strength is the one where free quietly means it does not work.
The one that costs nothing at all is already on your phone
Before you install anything, know what you already have, because most of these apps are sitting on top of it. Apple's own controls live at Settings > Screen Time, and the useful parts are App Limits, Downtime and Always Allowed. It is free in the complete sense: no tier, no upsell, no account.
It also has one setting that decides whether any of it is real. Go to Settings > Screen Time > Use Screen Time Passcode and set one. Until you do, Block at End of Limit does not appear, and when a limit runs out the screen offers you Ignore Limit For Today, which is one tap and gone until tomorrow. With a passcode set, that same screen offers One More Minute and Remind Me in 15 Minutes and then stops offering.
Set the passcode before you judge Screen Time
Almost everyone who says the built-in limits do nothing never set one. Without it, every limit on the phone is a suggestion with a countdown attached.
Three more things worth knowing before you decide it is enough. A limit attaches to the app, so deleting the app detaches it and a reinstall gives you a clean one, unless you close that door at Settings > Screen Time > Content & Privacy Restrictions > iTunes & App Store Purchases > Deleting Apps > Don't Allow. A limit does not cover the website version of the same thing unless you type the domain into the Websites field inside that limit. And a widget, a Spotlight result or a notification preview will each show you content from a limited app without opening it, and none of them trips the limit.
Free is easy. Free that still says no on a Tuesday night is the rare part.
Nine free tiers, and the thing each one keeps back
Ratings are US App Store counts from our keyword research in August 2026, a rough measure of how many people have lived with each app. Prices are deliberately absent: they change monthly, the shape of the restriction does not.
| App | US ratings | What free gives you | What free holds back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Screen Time | built in | All of it, unlimited rules | Nothing, but it is one tap wide until you set a passcode |
| Opal | 86,000 | Sessions and schedules you can end | Strength. Deep Focus, the tier that does not let go, is the paid one |
| ScreenZen | 48,000 | A pause, a breath, an open-count gate | Nothing much, and that is the point: friction is the ceiling, not the price |
| Forest | 49,000 | A tree that grows while you stay out | Enforcement. The tree grows whether or not you did any work |
| ClearSpace | 9,000 | Intentional-open friction before the app | Same ceiling as ScreenZen, dressed differently |
| one sec | ~3,000 | A forced breath before the app opens | The refusal. It delays the open, it does not prevent it |
| Focus Friend | 4,000 | A bean that knits while you focus | Enforcement, on purpose. Charm is the product |
| Jomo | 2,300 | A blocker with self-control framing | Count. Small team, thin free tier |
| Roots | 2,500 | Blocking with dopamine-detox framing | Count, as above |
The friction apps are the best free deal and the lowest ceiling
ScreenZen, ClearSpace and one sec give away almost everything, and they can afford to, because the mechanism is a speed bump rather than a wall. A pause, a breath, a count of how many times you have opened this today. On a normal day that is enough, and for a lot of people every day is a normal day, which makes these three the right answer and the cheapest one.
The trouble arrives on the day you have already decided you are going to open it anyway. A breath you can wait out is a breath you will wait out. None of these apps pretends otherwise, delay is the stated design. Just do not buy delay expecting refusal, and do not conclude you lack willpower when a speed bump fails to stop a car.
The session apps sell you the strict version
Opal is the biggest name here by a distance, and its free tier is a real product: sessions, schedules, a clean read on your day. What is behind the wall is the tier that does not let you out early. That is the strength trade, stated plainly, and Opal is at least honest about which half you are getting.
Whether that matters comes down to one question: when you hit the block, are you the person who ends the session? If you genuinely are not, the free tier is complete for you, so stop reading comparisons and go use it. If you are, the free tier is a countdown you administer yourself, and paying is not optional, it is the whole purchase.
The pet apps are a different product wearing the same category
Forest, Focus Friend and the study timers around them are lovely, and they are not guards. The tree grows whether or not you did any work. The bean knits while you stare at the wall. What they sell is a reason to want the timer to finish, and if what you lack is motivation rather than a stopping mechanism, they will beat every blocker on this page.
They fail the specific reader who already wants to stop and cannot. Nothing in them refuses you. Pick them for study sessions you have chosen to start, not for eleven at night.
A tree cannot be disappointed in you. I can. That is the entire difference in the product.
Who should close this page and buy something else
If the thing you need guarded is a laptop, none of the nine is your answer and Freedom or Cold Turkey is, though Freedom is a subscription and Cold Turkey is Windows-first and blunt enough to be hard to live with. If you have already beaten software twice and know you will do it again, a physical key like Brick or Unpluq beats every app here, and it fails the day you leave the tile upstairs, which is also the day it works hardest. If your problem is study motivation, Study Bunny is a better buy than anything shaped like a wall.
What we hold back, since we are on the list too
Scrappy is a small scruffy dog who guards three rules: quiet hours, a daily limit, and a limit on how often you open a thing. The free tier is one whole rule, uncrippled, plus every safety rail. Not a trial of a rule. Not a rule you can dismiss. One rule that behaves exactly as it will behave if you ever pay us, which is the count trade from the top of this page, and it is the only one of the four we are willing to make.
What Pro buys is the second and third rule. That is the honest whole of it.
Guarding runs through Apple's Family Controls, drawn by a sandboxed extension that cannot phone home. No account, no sign-up, no server of ours. When the shield comes up it escalates, from polite to surprised to firm to a flat "No." to genuinely wounded. Getting past it costs a treat, and treats are earned by walking, roughly two thousand steps for one, and buy five minutes. They are never sold and never will be. Resistance is set per app: negotiable takes a treat, firm makes you sit ten seconds first, absolute means he will not take the treat at all.
Delete-and-reinstall is closed by the removal lock, and switching that off takes a day, deliberately longer than an urge lasts. Nobody is ever genuinely stuck, because there is one emergency pass a month and he does not scold you for it. The Mac app has not shipped, so if the laptop is the problem, go back two sections.
One rule, free, forever, and it works. I would rather guard one thing properly than nine things politely.
What he'd do
- Set a Screen Time passcode tonight at
Settings > Screen Time > Use Screen Time Passcode, before installing anything at all. Half the apps on this page are worse than what that one setting turns on. - Open
Settings > Screen Time > See All App & Website Activityand look at Pickups rather than hours. That is the number that tells you whether you have a duration problem or a reaching-for-it problem, and most people guard the wrong one. - Pick one app to guard, not seven. Everyone who guards seven turns all seven off in the same bad ten minutes, and one rule that survives the month beats a system that survives a weekend.
Checked against
- iOS 26 Screen Time paths and behaviour, taken from this site's verified reference file rather than re-walked for this piece: the passcode requirement for Block at End of Limit, the Ignore Limit For Today option, the Websites field, and the delete-and-reinstall gap.
- Competitor mechanisms and US App Store rating counts, from this site's shared competitor reference, current as of August 2026. Ratings are rounded.
- No pricing figures are quoted for any competitor, deliberately. Tiers change often enough that a number printed today would be wrong before this page stopped being read, so each entry names the shape of the restriction instead.
- Scrappy's own behaviour, from the product: free tier scope, treats, per-app resistance, removal lock, emergency pass.
Or put a dog on the door.
Free to start, one whole rule, every safety rail. He does not know your passcode and does not want it.
Get Scrappy on the App Store