Curtail
A cat sits on your screen when you doomscroll for too long
Details
- External ID
- 1242604
- Source
- PH
- Company
- —
- Product
- Curtail
- Website domain
- producthunt.com
- Launched
- Sept. 6, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 1
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.30815693820825313
- Tags
- Android, Health & Fitness, Productivity
- Fetched at
- Sept. 6, 2026, 6:35 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 6, 2026, 6:35 p.m.
Description
An Abyssinian called Cash walks in and sits on whatever you were reading. You picked the apps and set the budget, and it ran out. You can watch. You can't tap. He stays five minutes or so, then leaves and your budget starts again. Dismissing him early costs a streak day. You can also choose a Ridgeback called Tango. Animations come from real pets. Next step - put your own pet. No internet permission, no ads, and your data stays on your phone. Free, no account. Google Play, Android 8 and up.
Enrichment
- Theme
- digital minimalism and focus tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- screen blocker to reduce doomscrolling
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While the cat animation and timer UI are straightforward, enforcing cross-app screen takeover on mobile requires navigating strict OS permissions and restricted APIs.
What it would actually take: On iOS, implementing strict app blocking and screen overlays requires Apple's Screen Time API (FamilyControls and DeviceActivity frameworks) along with MDM or specific restricted entitlements. On Android, it necessitates accessibility services or SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW permissions, which are strictly regulated by app stores. A developer needs deep understanding of native mobile operating system background management and parental control APIs.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 140 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #73 of 141 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 228 days after the earliest competitor.
- Unhooked: Screen Time Pet · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- NekoLock · ph · 2026-09-15 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Squirrel · ph · 2026-09-19 · 108 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Cat Paws: Cute Paw Surprise · ph · 2026-09-16 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Pixbu · ph · 2026-09-13 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- doomscroll.fyi · ph · 2026-09-28 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- DeskPet: Desktop Companion · ph · 2026-09-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Spendlane · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.