About
Intent is a Mac focus app for people who keep disabling hard blockers like Freedom and Cold Turkey.
Instead of locking you out of distractions, Intent makes you confront them in real time. You write what you're trying to do in plain English. An LLM picks an allow-list of apps and sites. During the session, if you open something off-list, a soft overlay appears with two buttons: "part of the work" or "take me back." Pick one and keep going. Nothing locks. No password gate. No scheduled shutdown.
The thesis is that hard blockers fail because the lockdown feeling triggers resentment, and resentment triggers disabling the blocker entirely. Soft blockers work because they remove the autopilot without removing your agency. Forcing the conscious answer is the entire intervention.
Built solo over a year of dogfooding. Mac-native SwiftUI. Status bar app.
Free tier includes 2 sessions per day and 7 days of history. Pro is $39 one-time and adds unlimited sessions, full history, saved modes that learn your allow-list over time, custom allow-list editing, accountability partner emails, a therapist/coach PDF export, and CSV/JSON/PDF data export.
Privacy is local-first. Intent text, reflections, and deviation data stay on your device. The only outbound user content is the optional accountability email, and only when you explicitly tick the box per session.
Available now at intent.menu. macOS 13 and up.