Gratlock

GRATITUDE + DIGITAL WELLNESS

One grateful sentence opens your apps.

Turn the urge to scroll into one sentence of gratitude. Your apps open for a window you set, and your private journal grows.

Download on the App Store For iPhone
Free 3-day trial
Gratlock gratitude prompt with a sentence ready to save and unlock
Your unlock window 15 minutes
to rest of day

THE IDEA

Turn a bad habit into a gratitude journal.

Gratitude journals are easy to start and hard to keep. Gratlock uses the urge to scroll as the reminder, so one grateful sentence becomes part of the day you already have.

HOW IT WORKS

A little friction.
Something worth keeping.

Gratlock pausing a blocked app until the user chooses to unlock it through gratitude
  1. 01

    Choose what pulls you in

    Pick distracting apps with Apple’s Screen Time picker. Gratlock cannot see which apps you chose.

  2. 02

    Meet a pause instead

    When you reach for a locked app, Gratlock asks for one thing you are grateful for right now.

  3. 03

    Write, unlock, move on

    Your apps open for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour, or the rest of the day. The lock returns automatically.

THE PART YOU KEEP

A gratitude journal built one sentence at a time.

No streak pressure. No blank-page ritual. Just honest moments collected whenever the urge to scroll brings you back.

“The smell of coffee this morning while the house was still quiet.”

A Gratlock journal filled with saved gratitude entries

RESEARCH BEHIND THE APPROACH

The pause is the science.
The sentence is the soul.

22 min/day

Less app use

A randomized trial of roughly 2,000 people found that self-set app limits reduced use by 22 minutes a day across 12 weeks.

American Economic Review, 2022

36%

Opens abandoned

Across six weeks of field data, people using the pause app one sec walked away from 36% of their gated app opens.

PNAS, 2023

145 studies

Gratitude adds up

A 2025 meta-analysis spanning 24,804 people found a small, consistent improvement in wellbeing from gratitude practices.

PNAS, 2025
Gratlock settings for blocked apps, unlock duration, and journal export

PRIVATE BY DESIGN

Your gratitude belongs to you.

Your journal is stored on your iPhone. Gratlock has no account and no server that can read your entries.

Apple’s Screen Time system keeps your app choices private, even from us.

Read the privacy policy

MAKE THE NEXT OPEN COUNT

Turn the next scroll
into one grateful sentence.

Download on the App Store

Free 3-day trial. Then $49.99/year or $7.00/week. Cancel anytime.