Case study · 02
Don't resist. Rewire.
RewireHeaven helps people quit porn, doomscrolling, nicotine or gambling without betting on willpower. You post a pledge under an alias, and when the urge arrives the app gives you a 10-minute timer and something else to do. Free, no card, and nobody ever learns your name.
Live in production · 2026 · Funded, built and operated by NeuroX AI
240 KB
The entire app
One app.html — no framework, no build step
10 min
The intercept window
Sized to outlast a craving, not to resist it
0
Cost and card details
Free with no paid tier; an alias is the only identity
4
Surfaces in the app
Home, arena, journal, profile — installable, with push
01 — The idea
The bet: willpower is the wrong mechanism.
Quit apps almost all sell the same thing — a counter and encouragement — and then quietly blame the user when the counter resets. That framing puts the entire load on the one faculty that is provably weakest at 1am, and it is why the category has such poor retention.
So we built around the two things that do hold. First, a promise made in public is much harder to break than one made privately, which is why the pledge is posted to a wall and a streak is visible to strangers. Second, an urge is a wave with a duration rather than a permanent state, so the app never asks you to say no indefinitely — it asks for ten minutes and gives you a physical challenge, a breathing pattern and your own pledge to read while the clock runs.
Anonymity is what makes the public part possible. You pick an alias, up to 20 characters, and a fake name is the recommended choice — “Anonymous” is explicitly allowed. That is the trade at the centre of the product: accountability strong enough to matter, with an identity weak enough that posting costs you nothing.
02 — What we shipped
Not a landing page. A whole product.
- 01
The commitment wall
Your pledge goes up publicly under your alias, with the day count beside it. The onboarding says it plainly — anonymous to them, binding to you. A promise kept private is a promise easily broken.
- 02
The 10-minute interceptor
Hit the panic button and a full-screen 10:00 countdown takes over, because redirected urges collapse within roughly ten minutes. The ask is never “never again” — it is “outlast this one.”
- 03
The redirect engine
During the window the app hands you something to do instead of something to resist: a physical challenge, a guided breathing pattern, or your own words from the pledge you posted when you were thinking clearly.
- 04
The arena
A live board of the longest streaks running right now, all under aliases. It turns a solitary grind into a standing you can lose, which is a far more reliable motivator than a private number.
- 05
Streaks with something at stake
The day count is the spine of the app — it drives the home screen, your place in the arena and the wall. Because it is visible to other people, a reset is a public event rather than a silent one you can rationalise away.
- 06
A journal, not a diary
A dedicated tab for logging what happened around an urge — what triggered it, what you did, whether it passed. Over weeks it turns the vague sense of “bad days” into a pattern you can actually plan around.
- 07
An alias instead of an account
Pick any name and start; no real name is asked for and none is needed. Sign-in with Google or email exists only for people who want their streak to survive a lost phone, and it is entirely optional.
- 08
Installs, and pings you
A service worker makes it installable from Safari or Chrome, and Web Push carries accountability alerts — the reason the staff of the arena feels live rather than like a page you have to remember to open.
03 — Engineering
How it's built: one document, thin server.
The whole application is a single self-contained app.html of about 240 KB — no React, no bundler, no build step, and no module scripts. A small JSON API sits behind it for the handful of things that genuinely cannot live on the device: accounts, the shared arena and the public wall.
Device-first, server only where it must be
Streaks, journal entries and settings live in the visitor's own browser, so the app works instantly and holds almost nothing about anybody. The API covers only what is irreducibly shared — sign-in, profile, and the public boards. A quit app is exactly the wrong place to accumulate a behavioural database.
Anonymity as a schema decision
The alias is the identity everywhere it is displayed, capped at 20 characters and never checked against anything real. Google and email sign-in attach to that alias rather than replacing it, so linking an account for sync never turns a pledge into a named one.
The timer survives a backgrounded tab
The intercept countdown is derived from a timestamp rather than an interval that ticks, so locking the phone mid-urge and coming back does not restart the window or freeze it. That is the failure every timer of this kind ships with, and it is the one moment in the product where correctness actually matters.
Same single-file trade as FoodNeverComes
One document means no hydration gap and nothing to break at 2am, at the cost of line numbers that drift constantly — you navigate by function name, not location. We took the same trade knowingly on both projects, and it is the reason a two-person team can keep shipping to them.
What it runs on
- Vanilla HTML · CSS · JS
- Single 240 KB document
- No framework · no build step
- localStorage for device state
- JSON API at /api/*
- Google Identity · email auth
- Service worker · Web Push
- Installable PWA
- Cloudflare edge
Why this is on our site: the constraint was the product.
RewireHeaven is what it looks like when the hard part is behavioural rather than technical. The engineering is deliberately small — one file, one thin API — because every hour went into the mechanism instead: what a person can actually be asked to do at the moment they are least able to do it. That is the same judgement a client is buying when they hand us a prototype that works in a demo and has to survive real users.
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