This product was not featured by Product Hunt yet. It will not be visible on their landing page and won't be ranked (cannot win product of the day regardless of upvotes).
Screen time apps tell you to stop. CTRL makes you pay. Focus sessions earn credits, social apps cost credits to open. Run out and they stay locked. Built on iOS Screen Time APIs with AI-verified focus sessions.
Hey PH, Jibi here.
I built CTRL because I kept losing 2 hours a day to apps I didn't even enjoy opening. Every screen time app I tried worked the same way: block the app, feel the friction, disable the blocker by day 3.
So I flipped the model. CTRL treats attention like money. A 25-minute focus session earns you credits. Opening Instagram or TikTok costs credits. No credits, no scroll. You can always earn more, but you have to earn it first.
A few things under the hood:
The blocking runs on Apple's Screen Time framework, so it's real shields, not a polite reminder you can swipe away.
Focus sessions are AI-verified. You tell CTRL what you're working on, show proof at the end, and it judges whether you actually did the work. No credits for staring at a blank doc.
There are no streaks or guilt screens. Miss a day, nothing punishes you. The economy just resets.
It's live on the App Store now. Would genuinely love to hear what pricing model feels fair for something like this, and whether the earn/spend ratio feels right. I've been tuning it on myself for weeks and I'm too close to it at this point.
Update from hour 6: most common question so far is "what stops me from faking a focus session?" Fair question. You set a goal when the session starts and submit proof when it ends the AI compares the two. A blank doc gets rejected, you earn nothing. A few people have told me the rejection stings more than any blocker notification they've ever gotten. That's kind of the point.
About CTRL on Product Hunt
“Make distraction expensive”
CTRL was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 4 upvotes and 2 comments, placing #116 on the daily leaderboard. Screen time apps tell you to stop. CTRL makes you pay. Focus sessions earn credits, social apps cost credits to open. Run out and they stay locked. Built on iOS Screen Time APIs with AI-verified focus sessions.
CTRL was featured in iOS (110.4k followers), Health & Fitness (82.8k followers) and Productivity (653.6k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 202.8k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted CTRL?
CTRL was hunted by Jibran Ahmed. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how CTRL stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Jibran Ahmed