The easiest way to hold yourself accountable.

You already know what to do. Now it stops being optional. Decide once, while you still care — what you'll do, how you'll prove it, and who checks. After that you can't tick the box without proof, and the people you picked can see whether you showed up.

You've had this conversation before.

You set the goal as the person who cares. You break it as the person who's tired. Follow-through was never really a willpower problem: today-you negotiates with tomorrow-you and loses every round, because tomorrow-you is the one who actually has to get out of bed.

So Commit works the other way round. You make the decision while you still care, in writing, and the app doesn't let you quietly renegotiate it when it comes due.

Write it. Sign it. Do it.

Every commitment is a small contract with four parts: what you're doing, when it's due, how you'll prove it, and what's on the line. Fill those in, sign it with your own handwriting, and it holds until you clear it.

You don't fill in a form to get there. Type the commitment the way you'd text a friend — “Run 5k Mon Wed Fri before 7am, photo” — and Commit reads the sentence and fills in the schedule, the deadline, the proof type and the stake as you type. It's a rule-based parser rather than AI, so it's fast and predictable. You review what it understood, adjust anything it got wrong by tapping a pill, and sign.

Receipts, or it didn't happen.

Different commitments need different evidence, so there are nine kinds of proof: a photo, a video, a screenshot, a file, a GPS check-in at a specific place, a live time-lapse, Apple Health data, an iOS Screen Time reading, or none at all when the commitment doesn't need one. Before-and-after photo pairs work too.

Proof is captured live in the app rather than uploaded from your camera roll, and it carries the time and place it was taken. A streak you can edit isn't accountability.

Someone actually checks.

You choose who verifies: friends you nominate, or Commit AI. Share a commitment with a group and everyone in it becomes a verifier by default; keep it private and Commit AI reviews it instead.

Commit AI reads the submission against what you actually committed to — the timestamp, the place, the image, the terms you signed — and escalates the cases it isn't sure about to a stronger model rather than guessing. If it gets the call wrong you can appeal within 24 hours, and appeals are judged at a deliberately lower bar than the original review, because a wrong charge is worse than a missed one.

Two details matter more than they sound. If nobody reviews your proof within 24 hours it approves automatically, so a friend who loses interest in week three can never cost you your streak. And a verifier can't reject you without writing at least a sentence explaining why — no silent thumbs-down.

Strict on excuses. Soft on real life.

You start with 10 grace tokens and earn another at 7, 14, 21 and 30+ day milestones. Spend one within 48 hours of a miss and the day is marked skipped, your streak survives, and any stake is reversed. They're finite on purpose — unlimited forgiveness is the same thing as no rule at all.

There's slack built in before that, too: a 30-minute grace window past every deadline, then several hours more before anything is counted as failed. You can also reschedule a task within 24 hours of its deadline, submit proof late for review, skip a day deliberately, or pause a habit over a date range.

Way harder to flake in front of your squad.

Pull friends into a squad of up to ten people and share habits and tasks with them. They see your proof land, they react to it, and they notice when it stops arriving.

The part that gives it teeth is the group streak: it only advances on days the group hits its completion threshold, so a quiet skip costs everyone, not just you. Each group picks that threshold — 100%, 75% (the default), or 50% for a hard week — and changing it has a seven-day cooldown, so nobody softens the rules mid-slump. It freezes rather than breaks while someone's proof is still waiting on review.

Five awards are worked out each week, and the scoring is deliberate: verifying your friends' proof earns you points, and missing costs more than completing earns. Being a good teammate counts.

Put something real on the line.

A stake is anything that makes skipping cost more than showing up. For some people that's money: $1 to $500 per commitment, in USD, CAD, GBP or EUR. Nothing is charged when you commit — your card is only used if you actually miss, and even then a hold sits for 72 hours before it's collected, so there's time to appeal.

You choose the recipient when you sign: Commit, a charity, or an anti-charity you'd hate to fund. Stakes are service fees paid to Cognitive Health Research LLC, Commit's parent company — not donations, not tax-deductible, and not held in escrow or trust. The accounting, including the figures that currently read $0, is published on the Charitable Giving & Audit page.

Money isn't the only option. On iPhone a miss can block the apps you chose through Screen Time, or you can earn screen time back with pushups, jumping jacks or squats.

Getting started takes about a minute

Four screens — welcome, sign up, verify your email, pick a name and username — and you land straight on the box where you type your first commitment. No feature tour, no questionnaire, no setup wizard.

What Commit is, and what it isn't

Commit is an iPhone app for building habits with real stakes: a commitment device combining signed agreements, verified proof, financial or screen-time stakes, and social accountability. It is currently in public beta through TestFlight and is not on the App Store, so there's no download link that works today. It's free while in beta.

Things it deliberately doesn't have: live group chat (reactions on proof are hearts, and the in-app chat reaches the support team only), no leaderboard, and no reminder scheduler — every notification is triggered by something happening rather than by a clock. Commit doesn't nag you; your friends do. There's no web app and no Android version, and Apple Health and Screen Time features are iPhone-only.

Read more

• How Commit works — the four screens from promise to proof, with real screenshots.
• About Commit — who builds it, and what we won't do.
• Writing — essays on accountability, commitment devices, and what the research actually shows.
• Missed one day and gave up? — why the reset does the damage, not the miss.
• Habit trackers with friends — why the shared checkmark stops working, and what holds instead.
• How to find an accountability partner — five structural failure modes, and a setup you can agree tonight.
• Accountability apps: the four mechanisms — social visibility, verified proof, stakes, and friction.
• What is a commitment device? — the behavioural economics, including what the evidence does and doesn't show.
• Compared with Beeminder and StickK — including when they're the better choice.
• Commitment Agreement — the contract you sign for each commitment.

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