Every focus app I tried, I bypassed within a week. And the good ones were too expensive. Force-quitting it, trashing it, or killing the process won't end a session. It just keeps blocking. Different from Opal: regex and substring matching, so you can block one subreddit instead of all of Reddit. Plus screen time stats with blocking suggestions, Pomodoro, and app minimiser. $29.99 one-time. $9.99 for students. No subscription.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I'm Anay, solo dev on this.
I have a real problem with distraction. I'd download a focus blocker, use it properly for about four days, and then find the hole. Quit the app. Drag it to Trash. New browser profile. Every time. The tool wasn't the problem — I was just always more motivated to escape it than to use it.
The ones that genuinely hold were either $45 one-time or $99/year, and as a student neither felt payable to fix a self-discipline problem.
So I built FocusDragon around one idea: the thing enforcing the block shouldn't be the thing you can close. It runs a root daemon. Force-quit the app and blocking continues, because the app was never doing the blocking. Drag it to Trash and it comes back. sudo killall and it respawns. There's a short video on the site of me trying all three and failing.
The feature I didn't expect to use most is pattern matching. Regex and substring rather than domains, so you can block one subreddit without blocking Reddit, or block YouTube Shorts without losing YouTube. That solved my actual failure mode — I rarely opened a site I'd blocked; I drifted into an adjacent one that was technically allowed.
Being honest about the limits: Recovery mode or enough determined terminal work will defeat it. It's built to stop the 11pm version of me, not a motivated attacker.
$29.99 one-time, $9.99 with a student email. No subscription — partly principle, mostly because I was the broke student.
macOS only for now. iOS companion with rule sync is close, plus an on-device model that reads what's on screen and checks it against the task you said you were doing.
50% off the one-time price with code DRAGON50, first 100 people. Doesn't stack with student pricing.
Would genuinely like to hear how you bypass your own focus tools. Every hole someone finds is one I can close.