The first check of Instagram was never the problem. It's the fifteenth — the one you don't remember making, forty minutes after you said you'd stop.
How it works
Choose the apps that take your evenings — UpCost locks them behind a block screen. To get back in, you pay in movement, counted by the phone itself.
Pay once and you get a few minutes. Come back an hour later and it costs double. Then double again. The doubling is the whole product: it's cheap to check once and expensive to keep checking.
Counted by the front camera watching how close your face gets. Calibrates to you on your first rep.
Counted by the phone's motion sensors, held against your chest. Easier on the wrists.
The gentle one. Counted by the motion coprocessor, so it works with the screen off.
You can switch mid-set. Halfway through push-ups in a meeting room and thinking better of it? Tap steps and carry on. Being unable to pay is how a self-control app turns into a nuisance.
Honesty
Push-ups are measured by how much of the camera frame your face fills. If you simply move the phone towards your face and away again, it counts a rep. Squats can be faked by bobbing the handset. Steps can be faked by shaking it.
Any app claiming otherwise is either lying or hasn't tried. A phone cannot referee your workout, and we're not going to pretend it can.
UpCost is a commitment device, not a lie detector. It exists to put a real, rising cost between you and the fifteenth scroll — enough friction that you notice yourself deciding. If you want to defeat it, you always can. The question it asks is whether you want to.
The rest of it
An emergency unlock: free, instant, never refused, no exercise. It's only counted. You can't be trapped by your own phone.
Gentle, Standard or Brutal changes the starting price. The doubling stays identical — it's customisation, not an escape hatch.
Choose whether an unlock buys 5, 10 or 15 minutes. Short and sharp, or long enough to actually reply to someone.
A 24-hour chart of when you actually give in. Most people are wrong about their own worst hour until they see it.
A day counts only if you paid for every unlock and never broke glass. No participation trophies.
One tap in Settings removes every block and forgets your app list. No confirmation mazes, no guilt screens.
What you get back
Every unlock is logged on the device — what it cost, which movement paid for it, and when. From that, UpCost shows you the shape of your own habit.
Example figures. Yours will be worse, and that's rather the point.
Privacy
No account. No sign-up. No analytics. Nothing you do in UpCost is transmitted anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to go.
UpCost cannot see which apps you blocked. Apple hands the app a sealed token instead of the names — it can't be read, decoded or transmitted. That's Apple's design, and it means your choices are private even from us.
The camera runs only while you're paying for an unlock. Frames are measured on the device and discarded immediately — no photo or video is recorded, saved or sent. The camera stops the second the set ends.
Questions
Tap Break glass. It opens everything immediately, free, with no exercise, and it is never refused. It's simply recorded so you can see how often you reach for it.
Yes — UpCost puts the wall back up when your paid window ends, whether or not it's running.
Because a flat price prices the wrong thing. Checking a message once is fine. Checking eleven times is the behaviour worth taxing, so that's what gets taxed.
Yes. Set the starting price to Gentle, pick steps instead of push-ups, and give yourself a 15-minute window. The app doesn't judge how hard you make it — it only makes the cost visible.
No. Break glass always works, Settings can turn everything off, and if you delete UpCost, iOS removes every block automatically.