No account · nothing leaves your phone
A few seconds between you and your reflex.
Clipa puts a short, deliberate pause between opening an app and using it. It does not block anything and it never decides for you. It asks one question, waits, and then gets out of the way.
Free for one app. No sign-up, ever.
so I have my evenings back
Try it
Tap an app. Feel the pause.
This is the real thing: the same word-by-word reveal, the same clamped timing, the same buttons arriving only when the wait is over. Set the delay to whatever you would actually live with.
| words in the sentence | 6 |
|---|---|
| interval per word | 900 ms |
| the sentence finishes | 4.75 s |
| buttons arrive | 5.00 s |
| the hold — a finished sentence, nothing to press | 250 ms |
How it works
Three steps, then it disappears.
-
01
Pick your apps
The ones you open without deciding to. Most people start with one and know exactly which.
-
02
Write your reason
One line, in your own words. You will read it back at the exact moment it is relevant, which is the only moment it works.
-
03
Open the app anyway, or don’t
There is always a way through. A lock you resent is a lock you uninstall, so Clipa never becomes one.
Why a sentence, and not a countdown
A spinning ring can be watched with unfocused eyes. You learn its shape in a day and then you are just waiting it out.
An unfinished sentence cannot be skimmed. Until the last word lands there is nothing to hold, so you read it — and reading your own reason is the whole mechanism.
A ring
Learned in a day. Watchable without reading.
A sentence
Cannot be parsed until it is finished.
After ten
At one in the morning, a white screen is not a neutral act.
Between 22:00 and 06:00 the pause changes its own colours — warm amber on near-black, no blue — and it turns your screen brightness down while it is on top. It never turns it up.
This is the hour the app was built for. It is also the hour most apps stop caring.
- Warm palette, no blue
- Brightness lowered, never raised
- Never a sound
It is 01:14. Is this how you want to spend it?
What it does not do
There is no account, because there is nothing to store.
Clipa sees which app came to the foreground and for how long. It never sees what is inside one, and none of it leaves the phone.
There is no server to sign in to and nothing for anyone to lose. Your stats live in your pocket and nowhere else. Export all of it whenever you like, or delete all of it in one tap.
-
It does not block apps
Every pause has a way through. Friction, not a wall.
-
It does not shame you
No red numbers, no grades, no “you failed today”.
-
It does not count streaks
A streak is just a thing to lose, and losing it ends the habit.
-
It has no account
Nothing to sign up for, nothing to sign in to, no password to forget.
-
It sends nothing anywhere
No analytics by default. If you switch them on, they carry no content.
-
It never plays a sound
Not once. It appears quietly or not at all.
-
It does not sell anything on the pause
No upsell at the moment you are trying to make a decision.
What changed
It counts the times you walked away, not the hours you lost.
Most screen-time apps hand you a number designed to make you feel bad, then leave you with it. That works for about a week.
Clipa’s headline number is the one that went the way you wanted: the opens you closed. Time per app is there if you want it, sitting quietly next to the count, never added up into a verdict.
This week
34
times you closed it
MonThuSun
Nothing here is a score
No streaks to break, no grade, no total that looks like a failure.
Pricing
Free for one app. Paid for the rest.
No trial that bills you quietly, no countdown, nothing pre-ticked. If one app is your problem, the free version is the whole product.
Prices shown in Romanian lei. Google Play charges in your own currency and the app always shows you that price, not this one.
Free
0
lei, always
- One app, slowed down
- Your own reason on the pause
- A wait of 1 to 10 seconds
- Every stat, and the night palette
Everything
Clipa full
49
lei a year — about 4 a month
- Every app, not just one
- Check-ins while you scroll
- As many of your own messages as you like
- A different wait for each app, up to 30 seconds
Monthly is 14 lei. Cancelling happens in Google Play, like every other subscription on your phone.
Does it actually work, or is it another app I will delete?
It works while the pause still makes you read. That is why the sentence is your own words and why the prompts rotate — a fixed screen becomes wallpaper in a week. Clipa is a few seconds of friction placed exactly where the reflex lives; it is not therapy and it does not pretend to be.
Can I get past it?
Always, on every pause, with one tap. That is deliberate. An app you cannot get out of is an app you uninstall in a bad moment, and then it helps you never again.
What can Clipa see?
Which app came to the foreground, and for how long. That is the whole list. It cannot see inside an app — not your messages, not what you scrolled, not who you looked at — and it has nowhere to send anything even if it could.
Will it drain my battery?
It stops looking entirely while your screen is off, which is most of the day, and it holds no wake locks. The target is under one percent of a day.
Why does it need permission to draw over other apps?
Because that is literally how the pause appears on top of the app you just opened. Android treats it as a special permission and asks you plainly, which is right. Clipa draws its own screen and never reads what is underneath.
Which phones does it run on?
Android 11 and up. Some phones — Xiaomi and Samsung especially — kill background apps aggressively, so Clipa checks whether it is still running and tells you how to fix it on your specific phone rather than failing silently.
One question, before the feed gets you.
Clipa is finishing up and heading to Google Play. Write to me and I will tell you once, on the day it is out.
No list, no newsletter. One message on the day it launches, and your address is used for nothing else.