--- title: "About Commit — Who Builds It, and What We Won't Do" description: "Commit is built by George Henin, operating as Cognitive Health Research LLC. What the app is, why it exists, what we refuse to claim, and exactly where the product stands today." source_url: "https://thecommitapp.com/about/" updated: 2026-08-12 --- # About *Commit* Who builds this, why it exists, and the claims we won't make. Commit handles people's money, so the least we owe you is a name and a straight answer about what the app can't do yet. *Last updated · August 12, 2026 · Written by · George Henin, founder* > **Read this page as a disclosure, not a pitch.** Everything below is checkable: the company that charges you, the address it's registered at, the features that don't exist, and the accounting that currently reads *$0*. If any of it is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — the last section has the address to send it to. ## What Commit is Commit is an iPhone app that makes following through non-negotiable. You write down what you're going to do, and then three things stop you quietly dropping it: **you can't fake the proof** — a photo, a video, a GPS check-in, health data or a screen-time reading, captured in the app rather than pulled from your camera roll; **people you know are watching** — you can share a commitment with a group of up to ten, and they see whether you showed up; and **there's a real consequence** when you miss. Money is one option for that consequence, not the whole idea. A miss can instead block the apps you chose on your own phone, or take your screen time away until you earn it back with pushups, squats or jumping jacks. People reach for different levers, and the point of having three is that the one that actually works on you is probably not the one you'd have guessed. > A habit tracker asks you, at your worst moment, to be honest about your best intentions. Commit tries to remove that question from the process entirely. ## Why it exists The problem Commit is built around is a scheduling mismatch inside one person. **You set goals as the person who cares, and you break them as the person who's tired.** The version of you making the plan on Sunday night is rested, optimistic and completely unavailable on Wednesday at 6am, when the decision actually gets made by someone with a different set of priorities. Every tracker we tried handed that Wednesday decision straight back to willpower. It asked the tired person whether the tired person had done the thing, and the tired person tapped the checkmark. Nothing was verified, nobody was told, and nothing happened either way. The streak survived. The habit didn't. There's a second thing worth saying, because it argues against using this app for the wrong reasons. People generally have perfect discipline for the things they actually care about. If you can't stay consistent at something, the honest first question isn't "why am I so weak" — it's whether the goal is one you chose or one you inherited. Commit is a good tool for a goal you mean. It is a bad tool for talking yourself into someone else's. ## Who's behind it Commit is built by **George Henin**, founder. The app is operated by **Cognitive Health Research LLC**, doing business as Commit, registered at **2261 Market Street #4012, San Francisco, CA 94114**. That is the entity named on the Commitment Agreement, the entity your card would be charged by, and the entity to sue if we get something badly wrong. It is a small operation, and we'd rather say so than imply a floor of people. **Why this page exists at all** An app that can charge your card should not be anonymous. Until today the "About" link on this site went nowhere and no person was named anywhere on it. That was a fair thing to hold against us. ## What we won't do This section is the one we'd want to read first if we were you. It's also the only part of an About page that can be checked, so it's the part we've made checkable. - **We won't publish numbers we haven't earned.** Our [Charitable Giving & Audit page](https://thecommitapp.com/charity-audit/) reports total collected, total disbursed and total retained. Every one of those figures currently reads **$0**, because no real money has moved. We'd rather show a page of zeroes than a page of invented impact. - **We won't call a stake a donation.** A forfeited stake is a service fee paid to Cognitive Health Research LLC. It is not a charitable gift, you don't get a tax receipt, and any charitable allocation we later make is a corporate contribution from our revenue, not yours. - **We won't claim we are holding your money for you.** We don't hold it in trust, in custody, or in a separate account of any kind. On a miss, an authorization hold is placed and collected after 72 hours — deliberately, so there's time to appeal before anything is final. - **We won't imply you can download this today.** Commit is in public beta through TestFlight. There is no App Store listing, and you won't find a fake "Download on the App Store" badge anywhere on this site. - **We won't quote a statistic we can't source.** There's a popular claim that accountability lifts goal success rates to 65% or 95%; it traces back to a study that doesn't exist, and we won't use it. The real research on commitment contracts shows effects measured in a few percentage points. Small and real beats large and fabricated. - **We won't leave an error standing.** If something on this site or in the app is wrong, tell us and we'll correct it and say that we did. ## Where we are, honestly The full current state of the product, without the softening language: - **Platform** — iPhone only. Portrait only. No iPad layout, no web app, and no Android version — the Apple Health and Screen Time features are iOS-only by construction. - **Availability** — Public beta via TestFlight. Not on the App Store. - **Price** — Free during the beta. There is no premium tier and no subscription to buy. - **Not built yet** — Live group chat, so the squad talks in one place. No leaderboard. No reminder scheduler — nothing in Commit sends you a timed "it's 7am, go run" notification. That last one is a design position as much as a gap. The notifications Commit does send are almost all social: someone submitted proof, someone approved or rejected yours, a review is waiting on you, a friend nudged you. **Commit doesn't nag you. Your friends do.** ### Commit is in public beta iOS, free while in beta. We'll email you when a spot opens. There's no App Store listing yet and we're not going to pretend otherwise. If you'd rather read the fine print first, the [Commitment Agreement](https://thecommitapp.com/commitment-agreement/) is the actual contract you'd sign, and [What is a commitment device?](https://thecommitapp.com/commitment-device/) explains the idea Commit is built on, including where the evidence for it is thinner than people claim. ## How to reach a human These are real inboxes, read by the person who builds this. - **Support & bugs** — [support@thecommitapp.com](mailto:support@thecommitapp.com) - **Press** — [press@thecommitapp.com](mailto:press@thecommitapp.com) - **Partnerships** — [partners@thecommitapp.com](mailto:partners@thecommitapp.com) - **Legal** — [legal@thecommitapp.com](mailto:legal@thecommitapp.com) - **Privacy & data requests** — [privacy@thecommitapp.com](mailto:privacy@thecommitapp.com) - **Post** — Cognitive Health Research LLC, 2261 Market Street #4012, San Francisco, CA 94114 Corrections to this page are welcome and get answered. So does the harder version: if you think the whole premise of charging people to keep their promises is a bad idea, we'd genuinely like to read the argument. More ways to get in touch are on the [contact page](https://thecommitapp.com/contact/).