Nudge — Website Blocker, Screen Time & Shorts Blocker

Friction, not walls: delay and breathing pauses block distracting sites. Daily limits, local screen time. No account, no tracking.

Your browser is designed to be addictive. Every feed, every autoplay, every "next video" is engineered to steal your attention. Nudge works with your brain instead of against it. Most blockers put up a wall — disable the extension in two clicks and the wall is gone. Nudge does something different: friction. A short pause, a breath, just long enough for your prefrontal cortex to catch up with the dopamine loop that already started firing. This kind of friction — a delay-and-breathe pause before a distracting site opens — has been shown in independent, peer-reviewed research to cut app opens by roughly half. Nudge brings the same mechanic to your browser, in the open. HOW IT WORKS Try to open a site you've blocked, and Nudge shows a countdown or a guided breathing pause instead of the page. Wait it out, or tap "I changed my mind" and walk away — most people walk away. Complete the pause and the site opens normally for a few minutes before Nudge asks again. Choose the intervention per site: - Allow — the site opens normally. Use it with a daily limit, grayscale or the feature controls below to shape a site instead of blocking it - Hard Block — the site never opens, period - Delay — a 5 to 300 second countdown before the site opens - Breathing — a guided breathe-in, breathe-out pause before the site opens - Daily Time Limit — allow a set number of minutes per site per day, then it's blocked - Scheduled Override — a different rule inside a time window, in either direction: block a site only during work hours, or keep it blocked but open it at lunchtime - Grayscale — drain the colour out of a site without blocking it, applied before the page paints so there is no flash of full colour TRIM THE FEEDS, NOT JUST THE SITE Blocking a whole site is blunt. Most of what costs you an hour is one surface inside it — the reels tab, the For You feed, the home timeline. Nudge treats those surfaces as their own targets on seven major sites, so you can keep the site and lose the feed. - Block, delay or breathing-pause a single surface — a shorts or reels tab, a For You feed, a home timeline, a front page — while the rest of the site opens normally - Give a surface its own daily budget: ten minutes of Shorts a day, YouTube itself unlimited - Hide the parts that pull: stories trays, "What's happening", "Who to follow", suggested accounts, promoted posts, comments, explore and reels nav entries - Honest limit: reels mixed into a home feed can't be picked out individually — no tool can do that reliably today. Gate or hide the whole feed to remove them, and Nudge says so in the app rather than implying otherwise. BLOCK YOUTUBE, EXCEPT THE CHANNELS YOU ACTUALLY WANT - Build a channel whitelist and block YouTube by default. Videos and channel pages from the channels you listed still open; the home feed, search, Shorts and everything else stay blocked - The block page lists your allowed channels as links, so the feature is usable rather than just correct - Or run it the other way: a blacklist, where only specific channels are blocked - Gray-screen turns YouTube grayscale with your allowed channels flipping back to colour - Hide the home feed, sidebar recommendations, end-screen suggestions and comments; disable autoplay STAY HONEST WITH YOURSELF - Commitment Lock — once turned on, weakening any rule (disabling it, shortening a delay, raising a limit) requires typing out a long random code by hand. Strengthening protection is always free. Honest caveat: no Chrome extension — ours or anyone else's — can stop chrome://extensions from removing it in two clicks. Commitment Lock makes that impulsive, not impossible, and we'd rather tell you that plainly than pretend otherwise. Commitment Lock now covers every per-site control: turning grayscale off, softening what happens inside a schedule window, loosening a feature gate or raising its budget, un-hiding an element, and editing the channel lists — including the case that cuts both ways, where adding a channel to a whitelist and removing one from a blacklist are both ways of allowing more. - Escape Hatch — one 2-minute pass per day, shared across every site, for genuine emergencies. Hidden entirely while Commitment Lock is on, because a commitment device can't have a one-tap bypass. - Dashboard — screen time today and over the last 7 days, how many times you were blocked, how many times you walked away, an hourly activity heatmap, and your top sites. WHAT NUDGE DOESN'T DO Most blockers are built by companies that watch everything you browse and monetize the pattern. Nudge makes zero network requests. It cannot phone home even if it wanted to — there's no server to phone. - No account, ever - No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting - Your usage data never leaves your device — it isn't even part of the optional settings sync - Every line of code is public: github.com/astraedus/nudge - Free and open source under GPL-3.0. If you don't trust this description, read the code. BUILT ON THE SAME ENGINE AS THE NUDGE ANDROID APP If you already use Nudge on Android, the same modes, the same rule names, and the same philosophy carry over to Chrome — one mental model across your phone and your browser. Break the scroll. Take back your time.