Covenant Eyes alternatives: the honest options
Covenant Eyes is accountability software, not a recovery programme: it takes periodic blurred screenshots of your device, scans them, and emails flagged thumbnails to a person you nominate. Verified August 2026, it costs $17.99–18 a month, $198 a year, or $950 one-off for up to ten users. So the first question is not which alternative to buy — it is whether you want anybody watching at all. If you do, the options are cheaper; if you do not, they are mostly free.
What Covenant Eyes actually does
It has been running since 2000 out of Michigan, which makes it the oldest vendor in this category, and the company says it has worked with more than 1.7 million people. Its design is deliberately relationship-first and built on religious framing: a human ally, usually a partner, pastor or friend, receives a report on what your device has been showing.
Mechanically, that means the app captures screenshots at intervals, blurs them, runs them through image recognition, and emails the flagged ones to your ally. There is no progress rendering for you — no milestone ladder, no urge tools, nothing about the hard hour itself. The product is the report.
Verified pricing, August 2026: $17.99–18 a month, $198 a year, $950 one-off, each covering up to ten users. Covenant Eyes runs thirty-day trial promotions through partner posts. Its Trustpilot score sits at 2.3 out of 5, with price complaints recurring in the reviews collected there.
The history worth knowing before you install it
In 2022, WIRED's reporting on accountability software found that the Android apps in this class were using accessibility permissions — an interface built for disability tools — to capture screenshots and full browsing and app activity. The material that reached accountability partners included private documents, messages, and financial and medical information. The reporting also documented churches requiring members and staff to install it, in at least one case as part of a staff agreement. The term the coverage used for that model was "shameware", and it was aimed at the software, never at the people using it.
Google removed Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You from the Play Store in September 2022. Accountable2You published its own account of the removal. Both vendors continue to operate; the point is not that the company is uniquely bad, but that the mechanism — one person's whole device relayed to another person — carries exactly this risk when the material is intimate and the install was not entirely voluntary.
Why the mechanism is getting harder
Google's policy restricts the accessibility API to genuine disability tools or approved uses, and it has kept tightening: Android 13 limited sideloaded accessibility apps, and a 2026 report says Android 17 blocks non-accessibility apps from the API outright. Screen-capture-based monitoring on Android is a shrinking foundation to build a subscription on. On iPhone the constraints are Apple's rather than Google's, and the question to ask a vendor is the same one: what is being sent, and to whom.
Who it is genuinely for
Households and institutions. If a family or an organisation wants a named human being to see activity, and everyone involved is choosing that with open eyes, Covenant Eyes is the most established vendor doing it, the ten-user pack is priced for exactly that case, and no consumer app replicates it. It is a poor fit for one person who wants help with their own evenings, because it does not offer any.
The alternatives, by what you actually want
Filtering without anyone watching. An iPhone already ships this: Settings, Screen Time, Limit Adult Websites, at no cost. Safari content blockers add local rule lists but only cover Safari — installing any other browser walks around them. On Android, Private DNS pointed at a filtering resolver needs no app at all. Paid filtering apps such as BlockerX run around $90–139.99 a year, or $129–149.99 one-off. Read do porn blockers work first: every one of these layers is bypassable by a motivated person, including the person paying for it.
A programme instead of a report. Fortify ($12 a month, $89.99 a year, $199.99 one-off) sells check-ins, lessons and correlation charts, ships no blocker, and holds the category's most sensible published line on a slip — a lapse is not a relapse. Relay ($11.99 a month, around $150 a year) runs therapist-designed sixteen-week groups, small and anonymous, matched by age, gender and whether you want faith or science framing. Both cost less than half of $198 a year.
Free. Rewire Companion on Android is a free counter with relapse history and a journal. NoFap.io is free and needs no account. r/NoFap and r/pornfree have roughly 1.2 million and 320,000 members between them and cost nothing. On this site, a quit porn day counter and an urge surfing timer run in your browser with no account and no cookies. The whole free landscape is in free quit porn apps.
A different consumer app. QUITTR is the biggest of them, with its own documented problems around billing and data — see QUITTR alternatives.
Where Unhooked fits
Unhooked is launching soon, so there is no store link to give you yet. It is the opposite design to accountability software: offline-only, no account, no sync, no ally, nothing sent anywhere, because there is no server of ours to send it to. Nothing can leak from it because nothing leaves the phone. It does not monitor, filter or report, and it never shows your record to another person. Urge tools are free forever inside it. If you want somebody watching, it is the wrong app, and this page has better suggestions above.
Common questions
Is there a free alternative to Covenant Eyes?
For filtering, yes: iOS Screen Time's adult-website limit and Android's Private DNS setting are free and need no app. For tracking and urge help, Rewire Companion, NoFap.io and the browser tools on this site are free. Nothing free replicates the accountability report, because that part needs a server and staff.
Why was Covenant Eyes removed from Google Play?
Google removed it, alongside Accountable2You, in September 2022 after WIRED reported that the apps used Android accessibility permissions to capture screenshots and activity. Play policy restricts that API to disability tools and approved uses.
Is Covenant Eyes worth $198 a year?
If you are a household or an organisation covering up to ten people who all want the reports, the per-person price is reasonable and no consumer app does the same job. For one person who wants help with their own evenings, it is roughly twice the price of a programme app that would give you lessons and tools instead of a report.
What is the cheapest way to filter adult sites on an iPhone?
The one already in Settings, under Screen Time, at no cost. Add a Safari content blocker if you want stricter rules, and remember other browsers walk around it.
Does accountability actually work?
The evidence for reducing problematic use points at therapy-grade methods — the CBT and ACT family — rather than at monitoring. Monitoring is friction and social pressure; when the install was not fully voluntary, the 2022 reporting shows what that can turn into.