Nitrus — Screen Time Counter & Site Blocker

Blocks distracting sites, or just counts the time you spend on them.

Nitrus is the first non-aggressive web blocker tool to control your screentime across web usage. It uses suggestions rather than hard control mode to nudge user to choose healthy habits and develop conscious decision making. Nitrus does one thing: it makes the time you spend on distracting websites impossible to ignore. Pick the sites that pull you in. Nitrus either counts your time on them, or shuts them out — your choice, switchable at any moment. MONITOR MODE A small dial appears on the sites you track and counts your time there. It only runs when you're actually looking: the tab has to be active, the window focused, and you have to have touched the keyboard or mouse in the last minute. Background tabs don't count. Walking away doesn't count. Click the dial to switch between time on this site today, time this visit, and your total across every tracked site. Drag it anywhere on the page and it stays there. Every completed minute, the dial gives a small pop. Anything that sits still long enough stops registering in peripheral vision — the movement brings it back. The pop is slightly different each time, because a perfectly regular one fades into the background too. BLOCK MODE Tracked sites get covered by a full-screen panel that blurs the page behind it. The page keeps running underneath: your video doesn't restart, your half-typed comment survives, your scroll position is where you left it. Nothing is unloaded and nothing is navigated away from. The panel tells you what you're actually doing: how many times you've opened the site today, how long you've been there today, and your total across all tracked sites. If you decide you need it, you can unlock the site for 5 to 30 minutes, or for the rest of the day. Either way there's a pause first — ten seconds by default, counting down in the button. Long enough to notice you've made a decision. A WAIT YOU CAN'T LEARN Turn on 'Random wait' and the pause becomes a different length every time, somewhere between 15 and 60 seconds. The point is that you can't learn it. A fixed delay turns into a toll you pay on autopilot; one you can't predict stays a decision. The length is drawn once per block and shown up front, and reloading the page doesn't redraw it or restart the countdown — if you reload halfway through, you pick up where you were. YOUR DATA STAYS ON YOUR MACHINE Nitrus has no account, no sign-in, and no server. It makes no network requests of any kind. Your site list and your daily totals are stored locally by Chrome and never leave your computer. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is sold, nothing is shared, and there is no analytics or telemetry of any kind. Daily figures are kept for 180 days and you can clear them whenever you like. HOW TO USE IT 1. Pin Nitrus to the toolbar and click it. 2. Add a domain - youtube.com, reddit.com, news.ycombinator.com. Subdomains are included automatically, so youtube.com also covers m.youtube.com. 3. Choose Monitor or Block. Tabs that are already open need one refresh to pick it up. Nitrus is free, with no accounts, no upsell, and no paid tier.