PhonePact, OurPact, OwlPact, LockPact: The Difference Is Who Holds the Keys

By Hank Yang. Harvard Divinity School, MTS '26 · Founder of PhonePact · Built internet businesses reaching millionsUpdated July 2026

I'll admit the obvious thing first: naming a screen-time app PhonePact put us in an aisle that already had OurPact, OwlPact, LockPact, and a clothing brand called Pact. Search for any one of them and you get some combination of the other three, plus an AI summary confidently explaining an app you weren't asking about.

So this page exists to sort it out. Not as a hit piece — three of these four are genuinely good at what they do, and one of them will probably be a better fit for you than mine. But they are not variations on a theme. They sit at four different answers to a single question, and the question is worth more than the comparison table.

The question is who holds the keys

Every tool in this category is a bet about where control should live. Once you see that, the four names stop blurring together.

With OurPact, control lives with a parent. That's the whole design and it's the right design for a nine-year-old's iPad. With OwlPact, control lives with you and only you — a private pact, privately kept or privately broken. With LockPact, control genuinely moves to another person: apps are locked, and they hold the key. With PhonePact, there are no keys, because there's no lock. What changes instead is who knows.

That last distinction is the one people miss, so it's worth being blunt about: PhonePact cannot stop you from using your phone. It was never trying to. It assumes you'd defeat the lock anyway, and puts its chips on the thing that survives your own override — a person who's going to see the number.

OurPact: the one you want if you're a parent

OurPact is a parental-control product and has been for years. A parent installs a companion app, pairs the child's device, and from then on can block apps, grant screen-time allowances on a schedule, filter adult content, see where the device is, and take screenshots of what's on it. It runs on iPhone, iPad and Android, and it's built to resist a determined twelve-year-old.

Two honest notes. First, this is a genuinely different category from everything else on this page — it's software one person runs on another person's phone, which is appropriate for a young child and inappropriate for an adult who is trying to change their own habit. Second, if you came here as a parent of a teenager, the research is less kind to surveillance than the marketing is; we wrote about why kids bypass parental controls and what works better than confiscation.

Pick OurPact if the phone belongs to a child young enough that you making the rules is the point. It's not a self-control tool and doesn't pretend to be.

OwlPact: the one that keeps it strictly between you and you

OwlPact: Phone Pact is an independent app — one developer, Pavel Bochkov-Rastopchin, not a company — built on a tidy idea: make a pact to put the phone down, and get an honest verdict on whether you kept it. No parent, no partner, no circle. Just you, the commitment, and the result.

There is a real argument for that. Some people find outside involvement humiliating, and some habits genuinely do respond to nothing more than being measured against a promise. If you've never tried keeping a deliberate phone-down window and grading yourself on it, this is a low-stakes place to start, and you'll learn something either way.

The limit is structural rather than a flaw in the app, and it's the same limit every solo tool runs into: a private lapse costs nothing. You are the promiser, the enforcer and the judge, and on a bad Tuesday all three of you are tired at the same time.

Pick OwlPact if you want a self-contained pact and you know from experience that a number on a screen is enough to move you.

LockPact: the one that actually hands over the key

LockPact is the closest neighbour to what I build, and it's a sharp product. Two people pair with a six-digit code, each picks apps to lock on their own iPhone, and from then on an unlock needs the partner's approval. If you try to work around the lock, your partner is told. Core features are free — pairing, locking, bypass detection, unlock requests — with an optional one-time purchase.

What I like about it: it takes the key out of your pocket for real, and its bypass detection is an honest admission that people bypass things. What it asks of you is a very particular relationship — someone willing to be pinged for approvals, and willing to say no. That works beautifully for some couples and quietly poisons others, because "you have to ask me for permission" is a role, and not everyone should play it with a person they live with.

Pick LockPact if you want hard locks and you have exactly one person who can hold that key without it changing how you talk to each other.

PhonePact: the one where nothing is locked and someone still knows

Mine, so read it with that in mind.

PhonePact reads the whole-device screen time on your own iPhone — the same total you'd see in Settings — and counts it upward toward a pact point you choose. There's no countdown and no "time remaining," because a countdown invites you to spend it. Ten usage-minutes before you reach your point, you get a private notice nobody else sees. When you reach it, up to three circles you picked receive one plain sentence: Hank reached 2 hours of screen time today. Then again at every additional thirty minutes, up to six more times.

What your circle never receives is which apps you opened, what you typed, where you were, or how you compare to anyone. There's no streak to break, no score, no leaderboard. Changing your pact point takes one partner's approval and a stated duration, so raising it during a brutal work month is a conversation rather than a secret. Circle rooms are plain text and messages disappear after 24 hours, on purpose — nothing accumulates into a record.

And to be straight with you about where it is: PhonePact isn't on the App Store yet. It's in development with a waitlist, which is part of why searching for it surfaces the other three. When it ships it's free to download, free for 30 days from the moment your first pact is live, then $0.99 a month or $9.99 a year. No card up front, no ads ever, and we don't sell usage data — the full list of what we refuse to collect is here.

Pick PhonePact if you've beaten every blocker you ever installed, you don't want anyone holding a key, and you suspect the missing ingredient was never a stronger lock but someone who knows the number.

One more name, briefly

If you searched "pact app" you may also have landed on Pact — which is variously an apparel brand and a series of goal-commitment apps, including an older fitness app that charged your card when you skipped the gym. None of them are related to any of the four above, or to each other.

The honest summary

Parent of a young kid: OurPact. Want it strictly private: OwlPact. Want real locks with one trusted keyholder: LockPact. Want no locks at all, and a few people who quietly know when you pass your own line: that's the one I'm building.

What none of them can do is want it for you. That part stays yours no matter which icon ends up on your home screen.