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 real sports calendar.
- No therapy
- No blocking
- No lectures
Coming to the App Store
iPhone first. Free while it’s being built.
Tonight
Elevated risk
- Payday landed today.
- Three matches tonight, two of them Champions League.
- Your last two slips were both match nights after payday.
The thing it does that nothing else does
Your patterns, crossed with the calendar.
Most apps in this category treat an urge as weather to be journalled after the fact. For gambling, the biggest triggers are external and published weeks in advance — payday, a full fixture list, a tournament final. Every evening the app crosses what you have logged with what is actually on, and says what tonight looks like.
Three bands, and that’s all
- Low risk
- Elevated risk
- High risk
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.
An example, not a promise
Someone who put £600 a month in is looking at £7,200 a year, or about £20 a day. Most people have never seen that written down.
That money’s gone and this app can’t fetch it. What it can do is count what you don’t lose from here.
The number nobody has written down
Where the money stands.
During setup it asks one question about money: roughly what a typical month used to cost. Not what you staked — 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.
Anonymous usage statistics are off unless you switch them on. If you do, 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 identifier, and each session is unlinkable to the last.
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: Helplines and crisis resources →