A pause slows you down.
A block stops you.

One Sec slows you down. Open a distracting app and it drops in a breathing screen first, a few seconds of friction meant to make you reconsider. If you still want in after that, you get in. It's a pause, not a wall, and a pause can always be clicked through.

Fella is a wall. The app is locked, full stop, not delayed. The only way in is the one 5-minute emergency unlock available in each blocking session, and once you've used it, the lock comes back on its own. No deciding each time whether to keep scrolling.

Both run on Apple's own Screen Time framework, so if gentle friction stopped working for you, the fix isn't a longer pause. It's removing the decision entirely. Fella runs $9.99 a month or $34.99 a year, with a 3-day free trial to feel the difference.

One Sec isn't leaning on a made-up stat. A peer-reviewed study run with the Max Planck Institute and Heidelberg University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that One Sec's pause reduced social media app openings by 57% on average. That's about as credible as this kind of research gets.

What it measured was persuasion succeeding, not access being removed. The pause interrupts the reflex, offers a moment to reconsider, and over half the time, people chose to close the app instead of continuing. That's real behavior change, built entirely on the pause winning that moment.

The other 43% of the time, it didn't win, and the app opened anyway. Fella isn't trying to win a persuasion moment. There's no pause to get through, successfully or not, because the app is locked regardless of how convinced you are that you want in.

Research and user testing point to 5 to 15 seconds as the effective range for this kind of pause. Long enough to interrupt a reflex, short enough that it doesn't feel like a wall you'd give up trying to get through. That's a deliberate design choice, not an oversight.

But a pause tuned to be tolerable is also a pause tuned to be gotten through. Ten seconds of breathing is a small price for an app that's already won the argument in your head. On the days the urge is strongest, a short, bearable pause is exactly the kind of friction that stops mattering.

Fella has no duration to tune, because there's nothing to get through. The block isn't calibrated to feel tolerable, it's calibrated to hold.

No way to talk yourself in. A pause can be clicked through, breathed past, dismissed without a second thought. A block can't be reasoned with. The app simply isn't there, no matter how convincing the excuse sounds at 11pm.

One unlock, not unlimited pauses. Fella caps you at a single 5-minute window per session, and it doesn't reset because you asked nicely. No "just one more pause" loop, no quiet renegotiation every time the urge comes back.

Built for people past the mindfulness stage. If gentle reminders already failed you once, they'll fail you again. Fella skips the nudge and removes the choice entirely, so willpower stops being the thing standing between you and your phone.

A breathing pause genuinely works for some people. If a few seconds of friction is reliably enough to make you close the app instead of opening it, that's a lighter-touch solution than a hard block, and it preserves more flexibility for apps you use in legitimately mixed ways.

Fella is for when the pause stops being enough. If you find yourself breathing through the prompt and opening the app anyway, that's the signal the friction needs to become a wall instead of a speed bump.