A companion for stopping gambling
Nobody’s up.
Not over a year.
Not over ten.
Sonar counts what it actually cost you, and tells you which nights are coming, built from your own patterns and the day your money lands.
- No therapy
- No blocking
- No lectures
Coming to the App Store
iPhone first. Free, with nothing to buy.
- A forecast every evening, with the reasons behind it
- Your whole history stays on your phone
- Free, with nothing to buy
Try it yourself
This is the real thing, not a picture of it. Tap a night, check in, or open the urge screen.
62
Days clean
£1,240
Money kept
The next seven nights
Elevatedtonight, Friday
- Money landed today.
- Both of your slips so far were on payday.
- Three matches on tonight.
Hightomorrow, Saturday
- Six matches on, including the late kick-off.
- Saturday is your hardest night: four of your six slips.
- Payday was two days before.
LowSunday
- No matches on that you follow.
- Sundays have never been a problem for you.
LowMonday
- Nothing in the calendar.
- Four days since money landed.
LowTuesday
- Nothing in the calendar.
- Your quietest weekday on the record so far.
ElevatedWednesday
- Two matches on in the evening.
- Midweek fixtures have come up twice in your check-ins.
LowThursday
- Nothing in the calendar.
- A week out from the next payday.
How that’s worked out
- 62 nights at your old rate
- £1,320
- What slips actually cost
- −£80
- Kept
- £1,240
Friday night
Did you stay clean?
How strong were the urges?
None at allMildThere, but manageableStrong. Hard to think about anything else.As bad as it gets
When were they strongest?
What was going on?optional
Sitting with it
04:12
Counting up. There is nothing to reach.
You are hereIt drops from here
You wrote this down
I want to stop lying to Rachel about the bank app.
£8,400 last year. That was meant to be the deposit.
- Cold water on your wrists. Sixty seconds.
- Walk to the end of the street and back.
- Eat something. Anything will do.
What happened?
How much?
£40
Leave it blank if you’d rather not count it.
When?
What was going on?
A record, not a verdict. Writing it down doesn’t reset your total days clean, and never has.
The thing it does that nothing else does
Your patterns, crossed with your payday.
Most apps in this category treat an urge as weather to be journalled after the fact. For gambling, the biggest trigger is external and on a schedule: the day the money lands, and the two nights after it. Every evening the app crosses what you have logged with where you are in that cycle, and says what tonight looks like.
The marks beside each reason are what it read to get there.
Three bands, and that’s all
- Low risk
- Elevated risk
- High risk
Tonight · Friday
Elevated risk
- Money landed today.
- Both of your slips so far were on payday.
- You’re 9 days in. The first fortnight is the fragile part.
A high-risk night reads like a weather warning, not a telling-off, and it always shows what produced it. You can look at those reasons and disagree with them; that is the point of printing them. A wrong forecast you can argue with is useful, and a score with no workings is not.
The night it matters
A slip is a data point, not a reset.
Your total days clean and your longest run are counted from your history every time a screen opens, so there is no stored total for a bad night to reset. Your current run starts again from today. That is the only figure a slip moves.
Relapse is the norm, so a counter that drops to zero at the moment of maximum shame is the category’s biggest reason people delete the app. Here, logging a slip is an act of honesty the app is built to encourage: it asks what led to it, keeps crisis resources one tap away, and adds what it learns to tomorrow’s forecast.
The number nobody has written down
Where the money stands.
An example, not a promise
One year, at £600 a month
£7,200
One mark for every night of the year. Most people have never seen it written down at all, let alone laid out.
- £20
- A day
- £600
- A month
- £7,200
- A year
That money’s gone and this app can’t fetch it. What it can do is count what you don’t lose from here.
How it arrives at the figure
During setup it asks one question about money: roughly what a typical month used to cost. Not what you staked, but what was actually gone by the end of it. From there it keeps a running account of what the old pattern would have taken, less what slips actually cost, and it says so when a slip has no amount recorded rather than inventing one.
Also in the app
01
The urge screen
One button, reachable from everywhere. A timer that counts up and has nothing to reach, the reasons you wrote in your own words, where the money stands, and five physical things to do right now. Urges rise, peak and drop; sitting through the peak is the whole trick.
02
Your patterns
The weekday that is hardest, the hours urges cluster in, what your slips had in common. Where there is not enough logged to say something honestly, the screen says nothing rather than guessing. Anything drawn from less than that would be a horoscope.
03
Thirty seconds a day
Did you stay clean, how strong were the urges, when was it worst, what was going on. Optional tags, an optional note. That is the check-in, and it is what everything else is counted from.
The urge screen and the helplines stay free whatever else happens, and always will. They aren’t a feature.
Where your history lives
It stays on your phone.
No account. No email. Nothing synced. Everything you log is stored on this phone only, there is no server holding it, and no one else can see it, not us either.
The app reports which screens get used and nothing else: never your notes, your reasons, your amounts, your urge levels, or which triggers you pick. No account, no email, and nothing that identifies you. These anonymous statistics are on by default; the privacy policy says exactly what they contain and how to stop them.
And the gap that comes with that
There is no backup yet. If you lose this phone, change to a new one, or delete the app, this history goes with it. That is a real gap and worth knowing now rather than finding out later. An export is the next thing being built.
Before you install it
What it isn’t.
- It isn’t treatment, and it isn’t a substitute for talking to someone who does this for a living.
- It doesn’t block anything. It won’t stop a deposit, close an account or bar you from a site. If that is what you need, the resources page lists the self-exclusion schemes that do it.
- It makes no claim about outcomes. It keeps your record and works out where your risk is. What you do with that is yours.
- It’s for adults, and it asks nothing about you that it doesn’t use.
If tonight is the problem rather than next month: