We built this on a specific behavioural mechanism, and we think you should be able to check our work — including the parts that argue against us.
Everything below is cited. Where the research is contested, we say so. Where it doesn't support us, we say that too.
Behavioural psychology splits into four quadrants that people routinely collapse into two. Positive and negative describe whether something is added or removed. Reinforcement and punishment describe whether the behaviour goes up or down.
| Add something | Remove something | |
|---|---|---|
| Behaviour increases | Positive reinforcementBadges, streak confetti, praise. | Negative reinforcementThe aversive thing stops when you act. The seatbelt chime. This is us. |
| Behaviour decreases | Positive punishmentInsults after a failure. What people assume an app called yourbully does. | Negative punishmentLosing something you already had. |
Nearly every "tough love" app reaches for positive punishment — make you feel bad after you fail. It's the weakest quadrant for this purpose. Punishment delivered after the fact doesn't teach the behaviour you want; it teaches escape from whatever delivers it. In an app, the available escape is the uninstall button.
Negative reinforcement is different, and it's unusually durable — avoidance learning is famously resistant to extinction, because the behaviour keeps being rewarded by the absence of the thing you're avoiding.
So every aversive element here is pending, announced, and cancellable by the behaviour. A countdown you can stop. A stake that burns at midnight unless you act. You are never punished for who you are — you're handed something you can switch off, and switching it off is the behaviour we want.
Voluntary commitment contracts — where you put something of your own at risk — have held up in randomised trials across several domains.
Giné, Karlan and Zinman tested a product called CARES with smokers in the Philippines. Participants deposited their own money for six months, then took a urine test for nicotine and cotinine. Pass, money back. Fail, money to charity.
Volpp and colleagues randomised 57 participants across monthly weigh-ins, a lottery incentive, and a deposit contract.
Patel and colleagues found that incentives allocated upfront and then removed on failure outperformed gain-framed incentives and lotteries for physical activity. That's why we show the full stake in your account on day one and subtract from it visibly, rather than holding a deposit you hope to earn back.
Worth knowing this isn't universal: a later trial in university students found loss framing performed worse than gain framing and reduced goal commitment. We treat it as a default worth testing, not a settled result.
The gap between intending something and doing it is well documented, and one of the most reliable fixes is embarrassingly simple: specify in advance when, where and how. "If [situation], then I will [action]."
This is why the app refuses "exercise more." It makes you name the trigger and the response, and it pushes you to put the action ahead of the moment you usually fail — "change into gym clothes before I sit down," not "go to the gym." That single field does more work than anything else in onboarding.
This is the question we get most, so here is the direct answer: because it would make the product worse at its job.
Shame and guilt are not interchangeable. Tangney and Dearing's framework separates shame — focused on the self, on what you are — from guilt, focused on the behaviour, on what you did. Because the self feels harder to change than an action, shame predicts withdrawal, concealment and hostility. Guilt predicts repair.
And in the specific domain people expect us to be cruellest about, the outcome data is unambiguous. Sutin and Terracciano followed 6,157 participants in the Health and Retirement Study across four years.
Insults don't work. They make the thing worse. So we don't sell them — and the alternative is harder to argue with anyway, because it's specific, true, and about something you can change tonight.
The common version of social accountability is announcing your goal publicly. That version is contradicted by the research.
Gollwitzer, Sheeran, Michalski and Seifert ran four experiments and found that identity-related intentions noticed by other people were acted on less intensively than intentions that went unnoticed. Social recognition appears to deliver a premature sense of already being the person you're trying to become. The effect held among participants strongly committed to the goal.
We post misses, never intentions. A missed commitment doesn't grant an identity symbol — it withdraws one. That runs in the opposite direction from the effect that undermines goal-announcement products.
You write the exact wording in advance, while calm. There's a fifteen-minute cancel window before anything sends, a hard cap of one post a week, and it's disabled entirely for sensitive categories.
When everyone's outcome depends on the group's performance — an interdependent group contingency — behaviour changes measurably. The Good Behavior Game is the most studied version.
But it only works while your contribution is visible. In a group of ten thousand, one person moves the number by a rounding error, and a contingency you can't influence stops being a contingency at all. That's why the research uses teams, and why we cap squads at twelve and switch the mechanic off below four.
Squad rewards are gift codes and cosmetics — never money. Nobody's stake is linked to anybody else's week.
You'd read this from someone else eventually. Better from us.
The studies above tested commitment contracts and if-then planning. They did not test our product. We are applying findings, not reporting our own.
Volpp's group found substantial weight regain after the incentive period stopped, and follow-up work by John and colleagues found the same pattern. Commitment devices reliably produce behaviour during the commitment. Maintaining it afterwards is genuinely unsolved and we don't pretend otherwise.
Only 11% of smokers offered CARES took it. Products like ours work for people who want this kind of pressure. That's a real limit on who we can help, not a marketing problem to engineer around.
Some researchers argue the boundary is blurrier than the standard account allows, and have raised methodological objections to the instruments used to measure the two. We think the design implication survives the critique — target behaviour, not identity — but the underlying science is contested and we won't overstate it.
It outperformed gain framing for physical activity in Patel's trial and underperformed it in a later student trial. We default to loss framing and treat it as a hypothesis we're testing, not a fact.
If you're dealing with an eating disorder, a substance dependence, or a mental health condition, this app is not the intervention you need. Certain goal types are locked in our product for exactly that reason.
We never insult users — that rule is published and enforced by an automated check before any message sends. But on the money: yes, we charge you when you miss, and that is our revenue. We'd rather state it plainly than have you discover it.
The conflict is real, so here is how it's constrained. The core product is free — we don't charge a subscription on top. Your first week is $0. Then $5, and the amount only rises after you have already missed: $5, $10, $20, $40, $75, $150, $300, $600, $1,000. You set a cap on every goal, nothing takes more than $1,000 from you in a month, and one word ends everything permanently at no cost. The doubling schedule exists so you reach a motivating amount fast without paying anything at amounts too small to motivate — and so nobody pays real money before the product has already given them something.
We screen at signup. Food, body and exercise goals accept actions only — never weights, calories or targets — and a positive screen caps those categories at timers and reminders. Exercise is included deliberately: driven training is part of the same pattern often enough that stakes are the wrong tool. We'd rather lose that customer than hurt them.
Because everyone knows what it means, and nobody knows what "accountability platform" means. The name describes how it feels at 11pm when you haven't done the thing. It doesn't describe what we say to you — every rule about that is published, and enforced by an automated check before any message sends.
We tried to design that and the law made it a bad idea: routing user money to a third party is money transmission, which needs licensing in nearly every state. Keeping the fee ourselves is ordinary merchant activity, which is why every long-running product in this category works this way.
There's also a behavioural argument. Money going somewhere good softens the miss — it turns a loss into a donation, which is exactly the feeling that stops the stake from working. Paying us has no upside at all, and that's the point.
Instantly, free, from any screen. You set a kill phrase when you write your contract; typing it ends everything. It ends the contract — it doesn't pause it. There's no pause, no vacation mode, no snooze and no grace period, because those are why other apps are decorative. Quitting is always available. Drifting isn't.
Because it's an outcome goal in the one domain where outcome goals do measurable harm, dressed as a seasonal promotion. We build seasonal skins — they change the voice and the look, never the rules — and that's one we've decided not to make.
Write one real contract, watch a window close, and decide for yourself whether the pressure is the useful kind.
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