Health, home and travel decision
Unlust
A competent developer can build and maintain a minimal self-hosted iOS replacement (guided program, tracking, subscriptions) in a few months using existing habit-tracker prior art; advanced features like cross-device sync, content polish, and integrated blockers are the main things you’d give up.
View on the App Store↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off120 h to build
$0/mo3 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Unlust alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- User completes daily guided exercises and tasks from a 90-day program, marks days as ‘clean’ to build a streak, sees progress metrics and receives push reminders/motivations.
What it still won’t have
- Polished, tested iOS UX and Apple App Store presence
- Existing curated program content and psychology-backed curation
- Community and optional Telegram integration managed by vendor
- Built-in porn/site blocker behaviors and any proprietary blocking heuristics
- Ongoing app updates and developer support
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Unlust does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
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What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a single-user iOS SwiftUI app (iOS 15+) with Core Data for local storage and StoreKit for subscriptions. Core features in scope: (1) implement a 90-day guided program schema and UI (daily lesson, checklist, completion state), (2) local progress/streak tracking and a progress dashboard, (3) local notifications for daily reminders and urge-management prompts, (4) minimal settings including support email and external community links (Telegram), (5) StoreKit subscription gating that unlocks full program content, (6) basic analytics events logged locally for debugging. Out of scope: system-level web blocking or VPN-based site blocking, server-side user accounts, multi-user sync. Include error handling for StoreKit failures and data-migration, unit tests for core logic (streak computation, day rollovers), and UI tests for main flows. Provide CI script to build and archive an App Store artifact.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score64
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productUnlust: Overcome Addiction - App Store
- open sourceFriesI23/mhabit
- open sourcexpavle00/Habo
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
