Freedom Review: What It Blocks and What It Costs

What it actually does

Freedom runs a blocklist as a *session*. You pick what to block — named sites, named apps, or the entire internet — set a duration, and start it. The block then applies on every device signed into the same account simultaneously, which is the feature the product is really built around.

That matters more than it sounds. Blocking a site on your laptop and nowhere else usually relocates the habit to your phone rather than ending it. Freedom is one of the few consumer tools that treats "all your screens" as the unit rather than one device.

Premium adds scheduling, so sessions start on their own without you deciding to start them, plus recurring sessions and Locked Mode.

How hard it is to escape

Firm, not absolute. Locked Mode is designed to stop you ending a session early, and it is a meaningful obstacle. But Freedom is still a single application on a device you control, and someone determined to get around it during a session generally can.

This is the honest dividing line between Freedom and Cold Turkey, whose stricter modes are built so that restarting, reinstalling or deleting the app will not lift a block. If you routinely talk yourself out of your own rules, that difference is the whole decision.

What it costs

There is a genuine free tier covering basic blocking, custom blocklists and focus music. Premium is listed by Freedom at $8.99 per month, $3.33 per month billed annually, or $99.50 as a one-off lifetime purchase, with a 7-day trial. The lifetime option is worth the arithmetic if you expect to use it beyond about a year.

Where it falls down

The subscription is the most common complaint, and the lifetime price exists largely because of it. Beyond cost, the honest limitation is the one above: firm is not the same as inescapable, and readers who need a genuine commitment device sometimes discover that only after paying.

Freedom is also broad rather than deep. It blocks well across everything; it does not do the intervention-style prompting that One Sec or ScreenZen use to interrupt reflexive opening. Those address a different failure mode — the unconscious reach — which no amount of blocking reaches.

Who it suits

Someone whose problem genuinely moves between screens, who wants scheduling to remove the daily decision, and who wants firm rather than punitive. In the site's month-long trial of five focus apps, Freedom was the pick for exactly this case.