Focus app for iOS
Make a pact.
Keep it for 15 minutes.
Pact is a focus app built around one rule. Show up for 15 minutes, and the app holds the receipt. No streaks to protect. No lectures. Just proof you kept the pact.
iOS 16.1+ No ads No data sold
How it works
Three steps. No setup.
Make the pact
Pick a category, type what you're about to do, and commit to fifteen minutes. That is the entire setup.
Show up
Start the timer. Close the app if you want. Pact does not nag you, shame you, or turn your phone into a therapist.
Collect the receipt
Every completed session prints a numbered receipt and stacks it in your collection. You can scroll back and see every pact you kept.
What makes it different
Four mechanics, one idea.
Pact measures the things other timers miss. Whether you got past the hardest ninety seconds. Whether today's work is actually compounding. Whether you are still you, one pact at a time.
Commitment Receipts
Proof beats streaks.
Every completed session prints a numbered receipt. Date, task, duration, and the short reflection you wrote after. They stack into a scrollable ledger you can flip through whenever you need to see that the work was real.
Streaks punish you for the one day you miss. Receipts do not go anywhere. Ten receipts sitting on top of each other are very hard to argue with.
Ignition Score
The first ninety seconds are the whole game.
Pact tracks the percentage of sessions you survive without pausing or cancelling in the first ninety seconds. It is the single most predictive moment in any focus session. Everything after is easier.
Most timer apps measure how long you sat still. Pact measures whether you got past the part where you almost did not start at all.
Chain Reaction
Density over perfection.
A chain is two or more consecutive sessions on the same task, with no more than a five-minute break between them. Pact tracks your longest chain today, your longest of all time, and how many chains you built this week.
A daily streak forces you to show up every single day or lose everything. Chains reward density. You get credit for real depth of work, not just for opening an app at 11:58pm.
Compound Minutes
Today's fifteen minutes, twelve months out.
Pact takes your focus pace over the last seven days and projects it forward a year. It converts that number into work-weeks of deep work. Each new session shows you what it added to the running total.
Fifteen minutes is easy to dismiss in the moment. It is a lot harder to dismiss once you see it adding up to fifteen reclaimed work-weeks a year. The reframing is the point.
Why it works
Built on the reason focus apps actually fail.
Most focus apps treat you like a machine that needs a longer streak. You miss a day, the chain breaks, and the app punishes you for the one thing you actually cannot avoid forever.
Pact inverts that. The only thing it tracks is what you actually did. The longer the stack of receipts, the harder it becomes to tell yourself the story that you are someone who cannot sit down and focus.
This is not motivation. It is evidence. Evidence beats willpower, and it keeps beating it on the day your willpower goes out.
Research behind the approach
Zeigarnik Effect
Once you start a task, your brain creates an open loop that pulls you back to finish it.
Zeigarnik, B. (1927). On finished and unfinished tasks. Psychologische Forschung, 9, 1-85.
Commitment Consistency
Once someone makes a small commitment, they act consistently with it. A stack of kept commitments quietly reshapes the self-image.
Cialdini, R.B. (1984). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Harper Business.
Emotion Regulation
Procrastination is about avoiding a bad feeling, not avoiding the work. The feeling fades about ninety seconds after you start.
Pychyl, T.A. & Sirois, F.M. (2016). Procrastination, emotion regulation, and well-being. Academic Press.
What early users said after two weeks.
“I used to waste entire afternoons. Now I just start with 15 minutes and the rest follows.”
“This app doesn’t try to do too much. It just gets me to start, and that’s everything.”
“The receipts are weirdly motivating. I don’t want to break my collection.”
FAQ
Questions you probably have.
How much does Pact cost?
Pact ships free during its launch window as a thank-you to early users. After the launch window closes, new users see a one-time paywall at the end of onboarding with monthly and annual options. Pricing is shown inside the app before any charge.
Users who download Pact during the launch window keep full access at no cost, permanently. That is not a promo code or a trial. It is the app.
Is there a free trial?
During the launch window, Pact is free with full access. No trial required, no charge, no paywall at the end of onboarding. Download it and use the whole thing.
When the paid update ships later, new users will start with a free trial before any subscription begins. You can cancel at any time from your iOS subscription settings, and if you do before the trial ends, no charge lands.
What happens if I skip a day?
Your daily streak resets the next time you open the app. Your receipts, your totals, your longest chain, and your Ignition Score all stay exactly where they were. Missing a day does not erase anything you actually did.
Pact is built on the research that missing one day does not derail habit formation. It is also built on the idea that apps which punish you for a bad week lose you for good. So it does not do that.
Do you sell my data?
No. Your session history, your receipts, your task names, and your reflections all live on your device. Nothing personal is sold. Pact uses aggregate product analytics so we can tell which screens confuse people and fix them. Details are in the Privacy Policy.
Why 15 minutes?
Because the hardest part of any task is the first few minutes, and fifteen is short enough that your brain cannot plausibly argue you do not have the time. Once you start, momentum takes over. If you want to go longer, Pact lets you set 45, custom, or whatever. Most people do not stop at fifteen anyway. That is the point.
Is this available on Android?
No. Pact is iOS-only and leans on native features -- Live Activities, Widgets, StoreKit -- that do not have clean equivalents on Android. There are no current plans to port.
What iOS version do I need?
iOS 16.1 or later. That is the floor for Live Activities, which Pact uses to show your active session on the lock screen and in the Dynamic Island.