The three of us made this

Hi, I’m Gediminas. I spent twelve years in the advertising business that pays for your feeds, and like most people I know, I still lose evenings to feeds I don’t particularly enjoy. The blockers I tried were easy to ignore and unpleasant to look at, which is a bad combination.

Curtail is the fix I actually wanted: instead of a wall, a cat. Soft enforcement works on me in a way hard blocks never did, so that is what the app does. It respects whoever is holding the phone, and it brings the practical parts: budgets per app, a bedtime window, a streak that forgives.

It’s a one-person project. I answer the email address at the bottom of every page myself.

The cat was real

Tango came first: a Rhodesian Ridgeback carrying the quieter half of a loud movie name. Cash, a sorrel Abyssinian, arrived later, and there was only one thing to call him. They lived here, they are both gone now, and this app is where they keep walking.

On-screen Cash is traced from photographs of the real one: same walk, same sit, same total indifference to notifications. When your time runs out he still turns up, sits where he isn’t supposed to, and stays until you look up. A monument would just sit there. This way he still gets to interrupt somebody’s evening.

Cash spent his first months determined to be Tango’s friend, and Tango came around in his own dignified time. The sunbeam below says how that ended. Tango isn’t in the app yet: drawing a Ridgeback that moves like he did is harder than it sounds, and a bad Tango is worse than no Tango. He’s nearly ready. Cash is covering the shift until then, which is roughly how it worked here anyway.

What Curtail deliberately won’t do

• It won’t lock you out. Dismissing Cash always works from the notification or the app, never from the overlay itself. That one step of reach is deliberate friction. Stop means stop, and uninstalling works like it should.
• It won’t shame you. No red screens and no withered plants. Sitting through a break means the app did its job; it never gets held against you.
• It won’t kill the pet. The streak forgives one bad day a week automatically, and days away from your phone count as clean.
• It won’t touch the network. No accounts, no analytics, no ads, no servers. Your numbers stay on your phone, and a screen in Settings lists everything the app remembers and erases it on the spot.
• It won’t pretend to be unbeatable. A determined person can always route around a cat: hardware keys still work, and the overlay can’t cover certain system screens. Curtail is built to interrupt autopilot. If what you need is a cage, this isn’t it.