Build → practicing a language every day
Lockin ties a real financial stake to your daily practice session. Hit your 15-minute target and your stake returns. Miss it and the forfeit goes to a charity you chose. The forgetting curve does not wait for your schedule to clear.
Suggested starting contract
$3/day against missing your daily target of 15 minutes of practice.
Free download on the App Store and Google Play. Account creation takes under a minute using email or Apple/Google sign-in.
From the challenge picker, select Learning.
Tap to select every app whose active time should count: Duolingo, Babbel, Memrise, Anki, Pimsleur, Drops, Busuu, LingQ, or anything else you actually use — Lockin pulls the list from the OS. Then grant the app-usage permission: approve the Screen Time prompt on iOS, or allow Lockin to read daily app usage in your phone's settings on Android. Without this permission, the contract cannot verify.
The default is 15 minutes of combined active time across the whitelisted apps per calendar day. Raise to 20 or 30 if you are training for a test; lower to 10 if you are rebuilding the habit from zero.
By default the deadline is end-of-day — 23:59 in your local timezone — meaning your minutes only need to be logged before midnight. Tap Set deadline in the wizard to pick an earlier time on a 24-hour picker; 9:00pm works well for evening practice that needs to clear before bed-zone scrolling, and 8:00am locks in a strict morning routine before the workday absorbs you. Tighter deadlines unlock higher Locks and XP rewards. The deadline is set once during contract creation and applies to every scheduled day for the life of the contract — it cannot be edited mid-contract.
The default is $3 per day. Pick an amount that registers as a real loss when 11pm rolls around and Duolingo is still untouched. Then choose from Lockin's vetted charity list across categories including climate, mental health, animal welfare, and digital literacy. If the OS reports less than your target on any day, the bulk of your stake funds that cause. Lockin charges a small platform fee to cover payment processing and operations.
Your stake is held securely by Stripe. The contract starts at midnight in your local timezone. Each day, just open Duolingo (or any whitelisted app) and use it normally — the OS counts the minutes and Lockin clears the day automatically when you cross the threshold.
From Lockin's data
Beta users on the language-practice challenge consistently report that the act of opening their app feels qualitatively different once a financial stake is attached — the session shifts from optional to obligatory in their own framing. Several noted they completed sessions on travel days and sick days that they would otherwise have skipped without a second thought. The most common feedback is that the stake amount matters less than the existence of any stake at all.
"I had tried Duolingo streaks twice before and quit both times within a month. Knowing three dollars goes to a cause I care about if I skip changes the calculation completely. I have not missed a day in six weeks."
— Anonymous beta user, language challenge, 6 weeks active
A verified day is any calendar day where the operating system reports at least your target number of minutes of active time across the apps you whitelisted, before midnight in your local timezone. The content of those minutes is not inspected — Lockin only reads the duration figure that the OS already records for Screen Time / Digital Wellbeing. Foreground time in apps you did not whitelist does not count, and time accumulated after midnight does not apply retroactively to the previous day.
You can adjust your daily target between contract periods — when the current contract concludes and you set up the next one. Mid-contract changes are not permitted, because allowing retroactive adjustments would undermine the commitment mechanism the contract is built on. If you are new to daily habits, starting at 10 minutes and moving to 15 after a completed contract is a reasonable progression.
Forfeited stakes go to a registered charity from Lockin's vetted list. You choose the charity from categories including climate, mental health, animal welfare, and digital literacy when you set up the contract. The bulk of your stake funds the charity you chose. Lockin charges a small platform fee to cover payment processing and operations. Refer to the transparency page inside the app for charity-by-charity tallies.
Any language app installed on your phone is eligible. Lockin's learning challenge does not depend on a vendor integration — it reads your daily app time from the same on-device counter your phone already shows you in Digital Wellbeing (Android) or Screen Time (iPhone). So Duolingo, Babbel, Memrise, Anki mobile, Pimsleur, Drops, Busuu, LingQ, Language Transfer, Lingvist, Speak, and any other learning app you install can be whitelisted. The only requirement is that you keep the app in the foreground while you study — minutes the screen is locked or you are in another app do not count.
Every contract has a per-day deadline by which your target minutes must be logged in your whitelisted apps. The default is end-of-day — 23:59 in your local timezone — so the day clears any time you cross your minimum before midnight. During the 7-step contract wizard you can tap Set deadline and pick any earlier time on a 24-hour picker — 9:00pm for an evening practice that has to clear before pre-bed scrolling, or 8:00am if you want the day's minutes locked in before work. The deadline you set applies to every scheduled day for the life of the contract. Tighter deadlines unlock higher Locks and XP rewards, since an earlier cutoff is meaningfully harder than midnight. The deadline is locked in at contract creation and cannot be edited mid-contract — that immutability is what makes it function as a precommitment rather than a movable target.
Free to download. You set the target, the stake, and the charity.