Opal Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Opal is a screen time app that blocks distracting apps on iPhone, Android and Mac and scores your day. It works, but Pro at $99.99 a year is steep for what competitors give away. Best for: iPhone users who have already failed with free blockers. Price: from $99.99/yr. Free plan: yes. Rating: 6.8/10.

What is Opal?

Opal is a focus and screen time app. You pick the apps that eat your day, set a rule or start a timer, and Opal blocks them. That is the core of it. Where it separates itself from the dozens of other blockers is the layer on top: an Opal Score that rolls sleep, focus and rest signals into one daily number, and a gem system that hands out rewards at 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1,000 hours of accumulated focus. It is a habit tracker wearing a blocker’s clothes.

The company is led by founder and CEO Kenneth Schlenker, and the product has been leaning hard into design quality rather than feature count. Opal was named a finalist in the Social Impact category of the 2025 Apple Design Awards, which tells you where its priorities sit. It runs on iPhone, Android and Mac. Note that the old opal.so address now redirects to opalapp.com, so if you are chasing links from a couple of years ago you will end up in the right place anyway.

What Are Opal’s Key Features?

Focus Rules and blocking difficulty

Focus Rules are the scheduling engine. You define what gets blocked, when, and how hard it is to escape. The free tier gives you exactly one rule, covering schedules, time limits or open limits. Pro unlocks unlimited rules, so you can run a strict morning block, a softer evening one and a hard weekend rule at the same time. Pro also unlocks the higher blocking difficulties, including a No Unblocks mode that removes the escape hatch entirely. That distinction matters: the free tier’s blocks are trivially bypassable, which is the whole reason people upgrade.

Focus Timer and Allow Only mode

Focus Timer is the manual version. Choose what you are working on, set a length, and the phone locks down until the timer expires. Pro layers on advanced timers and soundscapes for the session itself. The more interesting Pro feature is Allow Only, which inverts the model: instead of listing what to block, you list the handful of apps you are permitted to open and everything else disappears. For anyone whose distraction pattern is “I will just check one thing,” Allow Only is the setting that actually does something.

Opal Score and history

The Opal Score combines sleep, focus and rest into a single daily measure of how your technology use is treating you. On the free plan you can see today’s score and nothing else, which makes it decorative. Pro unlocks score history, and history is the entire point of a score. Watching the number move over three weeks is what turns this from a novelty into feedback. Gating it behind a subscription is a defensible business decision and a genuinely annoying product one.

Cross device blocking

Opal blocks on phone and desktop, so closing Instagram on your iPhone does not just push you to the browser on your Mac. That said, coverage is uneven. Opal is built iPhone first, and the Android implementation relies on a VPN to filter traffic. Independent testing has put VPN based blockers in the range of 4 to 6 percent of daily battery on an Android flagship, and some users report that determined workarounds still get through, including browsing in Safari while a block is supposedly active. Treat the blocking as strong friction rather than a hard wall.

How Much Does Opal Cost?

Opal Pro costs $99.99 per year, which works out to $8.29 per month, and the annual plan comes with a one week free trial. Paying monthly costs $19.99, with a three day trial. There is also a lifetime option at $399 as a single payment. Students can apply for up to 50% off Pro. Purchases made through Stripe carry a 30 day money back guarantee, though App Store purchases do not, so buy on the web if you want the refund window.

The free plan is permanent, not a trial, and it is more than a teaser: you get app blocking, one rule covering schedules, time limits or open limits, basic timers and soundscapes, and today’s Opal Score. What you do not get is unlimited rules, the harder blocking difficulties, Allow Only mode or score history. There is also a Teams Pro plan for organisations that want single invoice billing, training and a dedicated account manager, priced on request.

This is where our enthusiasm cools. Freedom, the most established cross platform blocker, is $8.99 a month, $39.99 a year or $199 for lifetime access, and it covers Windows and Linux as well. That is less than half Opal’s annual price. One sec, which uses a breathing pause instead of a hard block, is $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year in the US. ScreenZen is free with no premium tier at all and runs on donations. Opal is asking roughly five times the price of one sec and two and a half times the price of Freedom for a better designed version of the same idea. The design is genuinely better. Whether it is $60 a year better is a real question.

Who is Opal Best For?

Use Opal if you are on iPhone, you have already tried and abandoned two or three free blockers, and you have concluded that the reason they failed is that they were too easy to switch off. Opal’s No Unblocks difficulty and Allow Only mode are the strongest commitment devices in this category, and the Opal Score plus gem system gives you a reason to come back tomorrow. If gamification works on you, this is the app that uses it best.

Use Opal if you want one tool covering both phone and Mac, and you value a clean, well built interface enough to pay a premium for it. The Apple Design Award finalist nod was not marketing fluff. It is a nicer app to live in than almost everything it competes with.

Skip Opal if you are primarily an Android user. The VPN based approach costs you battery, raises reasonable privacy questions about routing all traffic through a filtering layer, and is simply less mature than the iOS build. Skip it if you need Windows or Linux blocking, because Opal does not cover them and Freedom does. Skip it if you are price sensitive: ScreenZen is free, and for many people free is enough. And skip it if you are technically inclined and enjoy finding loopholes, because you will find them, and then you will have paid $99.99 for the privilege.

Best Opal Alternatives

Freedom

Freedom is the veteran of this category and the most direct competitor. It costs $8.99 per month, $39.99 per year or $199 for lifetime access, so the annual plan is around 60% cheaper than Opal Pro. Its big advantage is platform coverage: Freedom blocks on Windows and Linux as well as iOS, Android and Mac, which makes it the obvious pick if your work machine is a PC. Opal is the better designed and more motivating app. Freedom is the more practical one, and it is the one we would recommend to most people who want blocking across a mixed device setup.

one sec

One sec takes the opposite approach. Instead of blocking an app outright, it interrupts you with a full screen breathing exercise before the app opens, then asks whether you still want to go in. The free tier covers one app, and Pro is $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year in the US with a one week trial. That is a fraction of Opal’s price. It will not stop a determined binge, but for people whose problem is reflexive unlocking rather than genuine addiction, friction beats prohibition. Try this before you spend $99.99.

ScreenZen

ScreenZen is completely free with no subscription, no premium tier and no in app purchases, funded by donations. It does intention prompts, delays and usage limits, which covers the core of what most people need. The interface is plainer than Opal’s and there is no score, no history dashboard and no gem system, so nothing pulls you back in. But it is genuinely free, and if the reason you keep abandoning screen time apps is that you resent paying for them, this removes that excuse entirely.

Final Verdict: Is Opal Worth It?

Opal is the best looking and most motivating screen time app we have used, and the Allow Only mode plus No Unblocks difficulty are the strongest commitment mechanics on iPhone. If you have burned through free blockers because you could always turn them off, Opal is the one that finally makes that hard. The Opal Score and gem milestones give the whole thing a shape that most blockers lack, and the free tier is real rather than a countdown to a paywall.

It lands at 6.8 because the price is out of line with what the category charges and the Android build is a step behind. At $99.99 a year you are paying more than double Freedom’s annual plan for less platform coverage, and you can get most of the behavioural benefit from one sec at $19.99 or ScreenZen for nothing. Our recommendation: run the permanent free tier for two weeks with your single rule. If you find yourself repeatedly wanting a second rule and a harder block, take the one week trial on the annual plan and buy through Stripe so the 30 day refund applies. If the free tier is holding, keep your $99.99.