Questions about OnCrest

No. Site blockers manage access: they prevent you from reaching a site, or cut you off after a time limit expires. OnCrest manages attention. It lets you go wherever you choose, and it watches for behavioral patterns that suggest you have drifted from what you said you wanted to do. When those patterns appear, it interrupts with a question rather than a wall. The distinction matters because most distraction doesn't happen by accessing a forbidden site. It happens after you arrive somewhere you were already allowed to be. A blocker can't reach that moment. OnCrest is built specifically for it. If you need a hard stop on a specific site, a site blocker is probably the right tool. If you need to understand and interrupt your own behavioral patterns within sessions, that is what OnCrest is for.

StayFocusd, Freedom, and Cold Turkey set time limits and block access to sites you designate. They are effective at what they do: if a site is blocked, you can't use it. That is a real and useful function, and those tools have earned their users. OnCrest works on a different layer. It doesn't block access. It adds a moment of reflection at the point where distraction patterns emerge. You must engage with why you are on a site before you continue, not before you arrive. The intervention architecture in OnCrest (soft interrupt, intention gate, friction escalation) is not available in those tools because those tools are not designed for it. They are access managers. OnCrest is a behavioral intervention tool. They can coexist. Some people run OnCrest alongside a blocker: the blocker handles hard stops on high-risk sites, and OnCrest handles the behavioral drift on everything else.

It depends on which intervention layer is appropriate. At layer one, it shows a small soft reminder: a brief, non-blocking notification. You can dismiss it. At layer two, it presents the intention gate: a dialog asking whether you meant to be here, with your intent statement visible. You must answer to continue. At layer three, it increases friction: adding a delay or requiring you to re-state your intent in text. All three layers are designed to create a moment of awareness, not to block access. Your response at each layer is recorded in the dashboard.

Yes, intentionally. OnCrest is not designed to be impenetrable. You can dismiss interventions, answer the intention gate with 'yes,' and continue on any site. You can also disable the extension entirely from Chrome's extension panel. The point is not to trap you. The point is to make the choice conscious rather than automatic. When you override an intervention, that override is recorded in your dashboard. The record is honest. Over time, the pattern of what you override and how often tells you something true about the gap between what you intend and what you do.

No. OnCrest watches for behavioral patterns using browser events: scroll velocity, tab-switch frequency, navigation event types, and session timing. It does not read page content. It does not store URLs beyond the domain level needed to know which configured sites you are on. It does not intercept your network traffic. It does not have access to what you are reading, watching, or typing. The extension operates entirely on behavioral signals, not content signals. This is not a marketing claim about privacy: it is a description of how the detection architecture actually works. Content analysis would require a fundamentally different approach, and OnCrest was designed from the start not to use it.

Three categories of data exist locally on your device: your intent text (written by you, stored locally, never transmitted), local behavioral pattern counts (how many times each behavioral state fired, when, and how you responded), and an anonymous installation ID (a random UUID generated at install, not linked to any account or personal information). None of this leaves your device by default. If you opt into anonymous analytics during setup, aggregate behavioral pattern counts are sent to a first-party endpoint. No intent text, no site-level activity, and no individual session data is ever transmitted even with analytics enabled. The opt-in is off by default and can be revoked at any time in the settings panel. No data is sold to or shared with third parties under any circumstances.

Yes. OnCrest is free during the alpha period for all early-access users. When it launches, there will be a free tier with the core feature set and a Pro tier that adds LLM-powered intent refinement and additional behavioral analysis tools. The free tier will not be a crippled demo. Core intervention features will be free.

Lockdown mode is a hard block on configured sites for a set duration. You activate it manually from the extension popup. While Lockdown is active, the configured sites are replaced with a screen showing your current intent and the time remaining. There is no bypass option during an active Lockdown. If you need a complete stop with no override available, Lockdown is what to use.

Focus mode removes the recommendation columns, Shorts shelf, autoplay overlay, and trending feed from YouTube's interface. You see the video you navigated to, plus the search bar. Everything else that would pull you toward unintended content is hidden. It does not block YouTube. It removes the architecture that makes unintended extended sessions easy. Currently, Focus mode works on YouTube only. Expansion to other platforms is planned.

OnCrest uses behavioral signals, not content analysis. Intentional browsing looks different from distracted browsing in the event data: a focused session has longer dwell times on specific content, fewer tab switches, and more click-through navigation rather than passive scrolling. Distracted browsing tends to show high scroll velocity without click-through, rapid tab switching without sustained engagement, or repeated in-site navigation at a pace that suggests recommendation-following rather than deliberate choice. OnCrest detects these patterns from browser events. It does not know what you are reading. It knows how you are moving. The thresholds are configurable if the defaults don't match how you actually work.

Yes. Any site can be excluded from OnCrest's intervention system entirely. If you use a site for legitimate work and don't want it to trigger behavioral detection, add it to the whitelist in the extension settings. Whitelisted sites are treated as if OnCrest is not running on them.

OnCrest does not currently impose daily limits in the traditional sense. The intervention system responds to behavioral patterns within sessions rather than cumulative time counts. If you are looking for time-cap enforcement, Lockdown mode is the closest current feature. Session timers with configurable daily limits are planned for a future build.

No meaningful slowdown has been observed in testing. OnCrest listens to browser events it is already emitting: scroll events, tab focus events, navigation events. It does not inject heavy scripts into pages or make frequent network requests. The behavioral pattern analysis runs locally and is not computationally expensive. If you notice a slowdown after installing OnCrest, please report it with your Chrome version and the site where it occurred.

No. OnCrest is currently Chrome only. Firefox and Safari support is planned but not in the current alpha. If you primarily use a non-Chrome browser, OnCrest is not yet available for you.

No. OnCrest is a Chrome extension and requires a desktop browser. A mobile version is on the roadmap. No release timeline is set for it.

Yes. You can pause all interventions from the extension popup for a configurable duration. During a pause, OnCrest continues running in the background but suppresses all intervention triggers. Behavioral data is still collected if you have pattern tracking enabled. The pause ends automatically when the timer expires.

At the start of each session, OnCrest prompts you to write your intent for the current work period. You type a sentence or two in plain language describing what you are trying to accomplish. This intent is stored locally and used as the reference point for intent replay during interventions. You can update it at any time from the extension popup. There are no categories or templates to select from: it is your words, in whatever form is useful to you.

When the regret dialog (intention gate) appears, it displays your intent statement alongside the question. Intent replay is the presentation of your own words back to you at the moment of decision. It is not a message from OnCrest. It is the text you wrote, shown to you when it is most relevant. If you wrote no intent at the start of the session, intent replay has nothing to display and the dialog appears without it.

Email bugs@oncrest.app. In the email, include: what you expected to happen, what actually happened, your Chrome version (found in chrome://settings/help), and your operating system. Screenshots or screen recordings are helpful but not required. I'm a solo developer and respond within a few days, usually faster.

When it's ready. I'm not setting an artificial timeline. The early-access list will hear first when a launch date is confirmed. If you're not on the list yet, you can join at oncrest.app.