What this rests on
Interviews with founders, researchers and critics, plus a reading corpus of fourteen documents—published trials, product documentation, privacy policies and regulatory filings.
- No user studies. Nobody was observed using these tools.
- No independent testing. Nothing was installed, measured or put in front of a participant.
- No measurement. Not one number on this site came from an instrument.
Each tool is ranked on my coding of that product's default configuration, argued from the research. Everything is published in full on the rubric page and in tools.json so feel free to disagree and decide for yourself.
AI disclosure
This site was built with substantial help from an AI assistant (claude). It helped synthesize the research corpus, draft the scoring rubric, and write the code. The interviews were conducted by me, the judgments encoded in the rubric are mine, and the errors are mine. Where the site tells you what research found, i checked those claims against the original sources. Where it tells you where a tool sits on an axis, that is my opinion.
The site also generates prompts for you to give to an AI model — those are starting points for a conversation, not instructions to follow unexamined, and you should read any code a model writes you before you run it.
Diagnostic limits
No efficacy claims
The site reports what a study found, with its sample size and its limits. It does not say a tool reduces anxiety, improves focus or helps you sleep. The evidence does not support claims like that about anything in this category, and for most of the database there is no published evaluation at all. A test fails the build if such a claim appears.
No inference about motive
For each tool the site states, where it can, who owns it, who funded it, what the privacy policy permits, and any documented enforcement action — as dated facts with sources. It does not write "so they may sell your data", score incentive alignment, or editorialize about motive.
No padding
Where a problem has fewer than three honest matches on the platforms you named, the site says so rather than widening its filters until the page looks full — and where it does widen one, it says which and why. One of the four problems, work bleeding into the rest of your life, has no tool in the database that was researched in depth, because nothing in this market was built and tested for it.
Tiers
Tier 1 — researched in depth. A founder or researcher interview, a published evaluation, or both. These carry a full set of axis positions, including judgments about how much the tool supports your own decision-making.
Tier 2 — cataloged, not evaluated. Read off public documentation and the mechanism literature. No interview, no trial. These carry only the axes that are structural properties readable off the design — how environmental it is, how much it asks of you each time, how costly it is to leave. The judgment axes are left empty rather than filled with plausible guesses, and the matcher scores them on a reduced rubric with no autonomy term.
Licenses
Stated separately, because they are different things. The code is under a permissive license; the written content and the rubric are under CC BY, so the reasoning can be reused and argued with. See LICENSE.
Más límites
- The four-way split is a reading of the literature, not a validated instrument. It has not been tested for reliability and it is not a clinical taxonomy.
- The diagnostic has never been evaluated. Nobody has checked whether following its recommendations helps.
- The database is a snapshot. Products change their defaults, and a position that was right when it was coded may not be right now.
- The weights are a defensible allocation of attention, not a finding. Reasonable people would set them differently, and the file is right there.
- The evidence base for the category is thin, short-term and mostly measured over weeks. Attenuation past six months is barely studied.
Style reference
The marks on this page and on the home page are traced from a notebook. The board below serves to shape the style and vibe of the website (as interpreted by AI).
