Block the sites stealing your focus. Head down.
Head Down is a tiny macOS menu bar app that quietly frosts over YouTube, X, and any site you name once you’ve lingered too long. No blocklists to wrestle with. No willpower required.
One-time purchase · macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon & Intel
“Close the tab. Open the editor.”
Friction in exactly the right place.
Most blockers either nag you to death or are one click away from off. Head Down does neither.
Frosts, doesn't nag
A 10-second grace period before anything happens, so quick checks stay quick and only the rabbit holes get frosted over.
Hold to skip, if you mean it
No click-to-dismiss. Hold the button for a second and a half to push through. Just enough friction to think twice.
Your list, your rules
Ships blocking YouTube and X. Add or remove any site straight from the menu bar, in two clicks.
Private by design
Everything runs locally on your Mac. No account, no tracking, no data ever leaves your machine.
Set it once. Forget it's there.
No dashboards, no streaks to maintain. Three steps and it just runs.
- 01
Name your time-sinks
Comes seeded with youtube.com and x.com. Add any site you lose hours to, straight from the menu bar.
- 02
Work like normal
Head Down sits quietly in the menu bar and watches only your browser's active tab. No window to manage.
- 03
Linger, and it frosts over
Stay too long on a blocked site and the page dims behind frosted glass, until you choose to move on.
The nudges you’ll see
- Stop scrolling, keep building.
- One more video and what? Just ship.
- Done beats perfect. Every time.
- Nobody's coming. Build it yourself.
- Ship ugly, fix later.
- Ideas are cheap. Commits are proof.
- You don't need permission to launch.
- The plan is fake. The product is real.
- Reading about it isn't doing it.
- Momentum is the only moat that's free.
- Close the tab. Open the editor.
- Refactor never made anyone a dollar.
- Stop scrolling, keep building.
- One more video and what? Just ship.
- Done beats perfect. Every time.
- Nobody's coming. Build it yourself.
- Ship ugly, fix later.
- Ideas are cheap. Commits are proof.
- You don't need permission to launch.
- The plan is fake. The product is real.
- Reading about it isn't doing it.
- Momentum is the only moat that's free.
- Close the tab. Open the editor.
- Refactor never made anyone a dollar.
It waits before it acts.
Open a blocked site and nothing happens, at first. Head Down gives you a 10-second grace period. Glance at a link, grab a timestamp, close the tab, and you'll never see the overlay. Stay, and the glass comes down.
- Leave the site and the clock resets
- Quick checks never trigger it
- A short cooldown after each block
Friction, on purpose.
There's no close button, no escape key, no click-anywhere-to-dismiss. If you genuinely need through, you hold the skip button for a second and a half. Long enough to ask yourself whether you really do.
- No click or keypress dismisses it
- Hold 1.5 seconds to push through
- Skipping still starts the cooldown
No dock icon. Nothing to manage.
Head Down runs as a quiet background agent. Your blocklist lives one click away in the menu bar. It comes seeded with YouTube and X, and you add or remove sites whenever you notice a new time-sink.
- Runs in the background, no dock icon
- Toggle or remove any site in two clicks
- Add a site by pasting its URL
Dims distracting tabs after 10s
Nothing leaves your Mac.
No sign-up, no dashboard, no cloud. Head Down reads only the active tab's URL to check it against your list, and keeps that list in your Mac's own settings. It's a small, native Swift app with no servers involved.
- No account, ever
- No analytics or telemetry
- Reads only the active tab's URL
- Native Swift, fast and light
Pay once. Head down forever.
It's a menu-bar app, not a gym membership. No subscription and no upsells. Buy it once and it's yours.
- Lifetime license, yours forever
- Free updates
- Works on all your Macs
- Unlimited sites on your blocklist
- 30-day, no-questions refund
Questions, answered.
Safari, Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge and other Chromium browsers, plus Firefox. It reads the active tab's address to check it against your list.
No. Everything runs locally on your Mac. Head Down only reads the active tab's URL to compare against your list, and stores that list in your Mac's own preferences. There's no account and no analytics.
That's the point: it's deliberately hard. There's no click-to-dismiss, so you hold the skip button for 1.5 seconds. You can always quit it from the menu bar, but the friction is what keeps you honest.
macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon & Intel. It's a tiny native app that lives in your menu bar, with no dock icon and no clutter.
Websites, in your browser's active tab. It's built for the place most of us actually fall down the rabbit hole.
Yes. macOS asks for one-time permission to let Head Down read your browser (Automation). Firefox additionally needs Accessibility access. Both are standard macOS prompts.
Close the tab. Head down.
Stop negotiating with yourself about “just one more video.” Let your Mac hold the line.
Get Head Down for $12One-time purchase · macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon & Intel