Focus & Productivity

Commitment Devices: How to Make Quitting Stick (Apps That Actually Bind You)

A commitment device locks in a choice before temptation hits. How it works, the research, and apps from stickK to Beeminder to friend-held locks, priced.

By Engineer Foodie Desk Oct 18, 2026 ✓ Sources checked Oct 18, 2026

9 min read

App prices checked Oct 18, 2026 (stickK, Beeminder, Covenant Eyes) and Oct 15, 2026 (Brick, FriendLock) on each vendor’s official site or Google Play listing. Research sources are linked in the text and under Sources. No affiliate links on this page (how we work).

Every January you swear this is the year. Gym four times a week, no phone after 10 pm. By February, Future You has quietly renegotiated every one of those deals with Present You, and Present You has agreed to all of them.

A commitment device is how you stop that renegotiation. Here’s what it is, why it works (real research, not vibes), the main types, and the apps that put something on the line, priced.

We haven’t tested these apps. Everything comes from vendor pages and the studies we link.

What a commitment device is

A commitment device is anything you set up now that makes it harder, costlier or more embarrassing to break a promise later. You make the choice while you’re calm, so the tempted version of you doesn’t get a vote.

The everyday example: leaving your credit card at home when you go out, so you can’t overspend. Or handing your phone to a friend before an exam, and asking them not to give it back until you’re done. Economists split these into hard commitments, which physically or financially enforce the choice, and soft ones, which work through a psychological or social cost, like the embarrassment of telling your friend you caved (Bryan, Karlan & Nelson, 2010).

Why commitment devices work

You’re two people, and one of them loves right now

Behavioural economists call it present bias. In David Laibson’s classic paper, the way people discount the future creates “dynamically inconsistent preferences, implying a motive for consumers to constrain their own future choices” (Laibson, 1997). In plain English: you know you’ll want the bad thing later, so you lock the door now.

The problem is that most people underestimate how much they’ll give in. O’Donoghue and Rabin found that “naive” people put off things with an immediate cost and rush into things with an immediate reward (O’Donoghue & Rabin, 1999). Opening Instagram is the immediate-reward activity, in case you were wondering.

The evidence that it changes behaviour

Money on the line: in a field experiment, smokers were offered a voluntary commitment contract with their own money at stake (called CARES). Only 11% took it up, but smokers randomly offered it were 3 percentage points more likely to pass the 6-month test than the control group, and the effect held in surprise tests at 12 months (Giné, Karlan & Zinman, 2010).
Phones specifically: in a study of about 2,000 US Android users, limits that “in most cases could not be immediately overridden” cut time on the targeted apps by 22 minutes a day (16%) over 12 weeks. 78% of participants set binding limits and kept using them through the final weeks, and they were, on average, willing to give up $4.20 for three weeks of access to the limit feature (Allcott, Gentzkow & Song, working paper version; final paper in the American Economic Review, 2022). People wanted a commitment device, and would pay for one.
Being watched: a meta-analysis of 138 studies found that monitoring your progress helps you reach goals, and it helps more “when the outcomes were reported or made public” (Harkin et al., 2016).

An honest caveat: accountability isn’t magic. A major review asks when accountability will “attenuate, have no effect on, or amplify” biases (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). The details of how you set it up matter.

The four types of commitment device

Money stakes. You pledge money you’ll lose if you fail. That’s stickK and Beeminder. It’s hard to argue with a charge on your card.
A referee or partner. Someone else checks whether you kept your word, or sees what you’re doing. stickK has referees, Covenant Eyes shares screen activity with an “ally”, and FriendLock gives the unlock key to a friend.
A hard lock. Software that won’t let you undo the rule mid-session. Freedom’s Locked Mode and Cold Turkey’s locked blocks work this way. See our how to stop doomscrolling guide for the phone versions.
Hardware. A physical object you have to go back to, like Brick. The point is that ending a session means getting up and going to it.

Commitment device apps compared

App	Type	Price	Source
stickK	Money + referee	Free; $5 fee per staked goal	stickK
Beeminder	Money stakes	$0, $8, $16 or $81/mo	Beeminder
Covenant Eyes	Partner sees activity	$18/mo, $198/yr	Covenant Eyes
Brick	Hardware lock	$59 once	Brick
FriendLock	Friend holds key	Free; Pro: check current price	Google Play

Prices in USD. stickK, Beeminder and Covenant Eyes checked Oct 18, 2026; Brick and FriendLock checked Oct 15, 2026.

stickK: commitment contracts with a referee

stickK’s help centre describes it as “a free goal-setting platform”. You write a commitment contract, and you can pick a referee who reports whether you kept it, supporters, and a recipient for your stakes, including an “anti-charity” (a cause you’d hate to fund). A stickK help article says there’s now a “flat $5 fee for new commitments with stakes” (stickK help, checked Oct 18, 2026). We read that from a help-centre snippet, so check the fee when you set one up. It runs on stickk.com, and we couldn’t confirm an app.

stickK still calls itself a free platform, then charges $5 for exactly the kind of commitment that has teeth: the one with money on it. Charge for it if you need to. Just don’t put “free” on the front door.

Source: stickK help centre, checked Oct 18, 2026

Beeminder: pay if you go off track

Beeminder’s pitch is blunt: “If you cross the line, we charge your payment method!” Goals “can be anything quantifiable”, including “minutes spent on Facebook”. Plans are Core at $0 a month, Infinibee at $8, Bee Plus at $16 and Beemium at $81, and paying yearly gets you 14% off. Beeminder says most of what you pay is “the pledges you pay when you wind up on the wrong side of the bright red line.” It runs on web, iOS, Android, email and Slack (Beeminder and premium page, checked Oct 18, 2026).

Best for: goals you can count, if a financial sting motivates you more than a friend’s side-eye.

Covenant Eyes: a partner who sees your screen

Covenant Eyes (its app is called Victory) lets you “discreetly share your screen use with an ally”, who sees an activity feed. It’s built mainly for pornography recovery. It costs $18 a month, $198 a year, or $950 one-time for Lifetime, and each plan card says “7 Days Free”. All plans cover unlimited devices for up to 10 people in a family. It runs on iOS, Mac, Android and Windows (Covenant Eyes pricing, checked Oct 18, 2026).

Best for: people who need a trusted person to see what they do, not just whether they hit a number.

Brick: a lock you have to walk to

Brick is a $59 device (two cost $106.20 with its multi-buy discount), and the app is free. You start a session by tapping your phone against the Brick, and you need to scan it again to end the session. There are five Emergency Unbricks in the app for real emergencies. It works on Android 12+ and iOS 18+ (Brick, checked Oct 15, 2026). Shopping around? See Brick alternatives.

Best for: people who need a physical barrier, and keep the Brick somewhere annoying.

FriendLock: a friend holds the key

FriendLock is an Android app blocker where a friend holds the unlock key: a blocked app opens only when they approve your request or share a 6-digit code, and it locks again when the time is up. It can block just Reels, Shorts or Spotlight while the rest of the app stays usable, and it sends your partner a tamper alert if protection is turned off. Free blocks up to 3 apps and may show ads on in-app screens. Pro unlocks unlimited apps, with a 7-day free trial. The listing doesn’t publish a Pro price, so check current price in the app (Google Play, checked Oct 15, 2026).

Its listing is refreshingly honest about what kind of device it is: “FriendLock is a commitment device, not an unbreakable lock. On a normal Android phone the device owner can still bypass restrictions through system actions such as force-stop, Safe Mode, factory reset or ADB. FriendLock adds accountability and visibility, not absolute device control.” That puts it in the soft-to-medium camp: the cost of cheating is asking your friend, or having them find out.

Disclosure: the team behind this site has a stake in FriendLock. (How we work)

Best for: Android users whose weak moment is late at night, alone, with nobody to stop them.

How to set up a commitment device in 10 minutes

Pick one behaviour. Not “be healthier”, but “no Instagram after 10 pm” or “three gym sessions a week”. It must be specific enough that a referee could check it.
Write an if-then plan. “If I reach for my phone in bed, then I put it on the charger across the room.” A meta-analysis of 94 tests found if-then plans had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).
Choose the type that matches how you fail. You give in when nobody’s watching? Get a partner or referee. You rationalise your way out? Put money on it. You can’t resist once you’ve picked up the phone? Use a hard lock or a Brick.
Set the stakes so they sting, but not so they ruin you. If losing it wouldn’t bother you, it isn’t a commitment. If losing it would hurt your rent, it’s too much.
Tell someone. Monitoring works better “when the outcomes were reported or made public” (Harkin et al.). Even a weekly screenshot to a friend counts.

FAQ

Are commitment devices effective? Research supports them, including a smoking-cessation field experiment and a 12-week phone study where hard-to-override limits cut targeted app use by 16%.

What is an example of a commitment device? Leaving your credit card at home, pledging money on stickK or Beeminder, or giving a friend the unlock key to your apps.

Are there free commitment device apps? stickK says it’s free (with a $5 fee for staked commitments), Beeminder Core is $0 a month, and FriendLock’s free plan blocks up to 3 apps on Android.

What’s the difference between stickK and Beeminder? stickK is built around commitment contracts with referees and anti-charities, while Beeminder charges you when your tracked number goes off course.

Sources

Bryan, Karlan & Nelson (2010), Commitment devices, Annual Review of Economics: https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.economics.102308.124324
Laibson (1997), Golden eggs and hyperbolic discounting, QJE: https://doi.org/10.1162/003355397555253
O’Donoghue & Rabin (1999), Doing it now or later, AER: https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.89.1.103
Giné, Karlan & Zinman (2010), Put your money where your butt is, AEJ Applied: https://doi.org/10.1257/app.2.4.213
Allcott, Gentzkow & Song, Digital Addiction (NBER w28936; AER 2022): https://www.nber.org/papers/w28936
Harkin et al. (2016), Psychological Bulletin: https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025
Lerner & Tetlock (1999), Psychological Bulletin: https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.125.2.255
Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006): https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
stickK help centre: https://www.stickk.com/faq (checked 2026-10-18)
Beeminder: https://www.beeminder.com/ and https://www.beeminder.com/premium (checked 2026-10-18)
Covenant Eyes pricing: https://www.covenanteyes.com/pricing/ (checked 2026-10-18)
Brick: https://getbrick.com/ and https://getbrick.com/products/grey-brick (checked 2026-10-15)
FriendLock on Google Play: https://link.sayne.design/friendlock (checked 2026-10-15)