StayFocusd, a side project by independent developer Warren Benedetto (who now works in product strategy at PlayStation), is one of the oldest tools in this category and one of the simplest to describe: a free Chrome and Edge extension that gives you a daily time budget for a list of sites, and blocks them once you've used it up. It has no mobile app and no account system — worth stating plainly, since it means it simply isn't a competitor for phone-based blocking at all, however good it is at the specific job it was actually built for. Its longevity is itself notable: StayFocusd has survived as a free, ad-free, account-free extension for well over a decade, in a market where most competitors have since added subscriptions, accounts, or both.
What StayFocusd actually does
You set a daily time allowance and a list of sites; StayFocusd tracks your time on them in the browser and blocks access once the allowance runs out for the day, resetting automatically the next morning. Blocking can be scoped narrowly — whole domains, specific subpaths, or even individual page elements like embedded videos, so you could in principle allow a site but still block the video player embedded on it. A "Nuclear Option" mode blocks everything for a set window, with settings and uninstall frozen until the window ends, for anyone who wants a much stronger version of the same basic time-budget idea. StayFocusd's granular, per-element blocking is genuinely unusual — most blockers work at the level of a whole domain, while StayFocusd can be configured to allow a news site but still block its embedded video player specifically. StayFocusd's "Nuclear Option," once triggered, also can't be reconfigured mid-block to add exceptions, which closes a specific loophole where someone might otherwise whitelist just one more site the moment they actually wanted to visit it.
Where StayFocusd is honestly the better pick
It's free, with no account and no subscription, which is genuinely rare in this category, and its blocking is unusually granular — targeting a specific embedded video rather than a whole site, for instance, which most competitors simply can't do. For a browser-only, desktop-based distraction problem, it's a well-built, no-cost tool that Mr. Grummel isn't built to replace, since Mr. Grummel doesn't run in a browser at all and has no equivalent concept of blocking one specific page element. That level of configurability does come with a real trade-off: StayFocusd's settings interface is more technical than most competitors', and getting the most out of it means actually reading the documentation rather than just installing and forgetting about it.
| Feature | StayFocusd | Mr. Grummel |
|---|---|---|
| Platforms | Chrome and Edge browser extension only — no mobile app | iOS & Android (in development) — no browser extension |
| Core mechanism | Daily time-budget for a list of sites, enforced in-browser | Answer a quiz question from the app's curriculum to unlock |
| Self-bypassable? | Yes in normal mode (disable/uninstall the extension); harder during an active “Nuclear Option” window, per the developer's design | Not yet released — can't be assessed |
| Physical hardware required? | No | No |
| Price | Free — no paid tier found | Not yet announced — join the waiting list |
The one mechanical difference that actually matters
This isn't really a contest between two ways of doing the same job — it's two tools built for different devices entirely, aimed at genuinely different moments of distraction. StayFocusd's daily time-budget model is a genuinely good fit for a browser habit: too many tabs open, too much time on one site during the workday, a problem that unfolds slowly over hours rather than in one sudden reach for a phone. Mr. Grummel's quiz-question model is built around opening a specific app on a phone, a different kind of moment with a different kind of trigger, usually much shorter and much more impulsive than a long afternoon of browser drift. Neither replaces the other's actual use case, and treating them as competitors somewhat misses the point of either. It's also worth noting that StayFocusd was built years before smartphones dominated daily distraction the way they do now, when a browser tab genuinely was where most people's attention actually leaked away, which explains why its design never extended to a phone app at all.
Who should pick which
If the problem is what happens in a browser tab on your laptop, StayFocusd is a free, well-built, granular tool for exactly that, and there's no reason to look further, or pay anything, for that specific job. If the problem is what happens when your phone is in your hand, that's a different device and a different habit — the one Mr. Grummel is built around, with no browser extension involved at all. It's also entirely reasonable to run both — StayFocusd handling granular browser-tab discipline on a laptop, and a phone-first tool like Mr. Grummel handling the different, more impulsive kind of reach-for-your-phone moment that a browser extension simply can't see or touch.