Excessive use of social media apps leads to reduced productivity, mental fatigue, and difficulty maintaining healthy digital habits. Users often lack concrete mechanisms to enforce self‑imposed screen‑time limits, resulting in repeated over‑consumption. Sway provides a mobile‑first platform that lets users define daily usage caps for apps such as Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube and back those caps with a monetary stake.
Funding
Funding not disclosed
Founders
Product
Problem
Excessive use of social media apps leads to reduced productivity, mental fatigue, and difficulty maintaining healthy digital habits. Users often lack concrete mechanisms to enforce self‑imposed screen‑time limits, resulting in repeated over‑consumption.
Solution
Sway provides a mobile‑first platform that lets users define daily usage caps for apps such as Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube and back those caps with a monetary stake. The app monitors app‑foreground time via native OS usage APIs, automatically verifies compliance, and releases the staked amount as a payout when the limit is respected. If the user exceeds the limit, the stake is forfeited to a communal prize pool, creating a transparent financial incentive to stay within the set boundaries. All transactions are processed through an integrated payment gateway, and users can view real‑time progress and earnings in a dedicated dashboard.
Target Audience
The primary customers are individual smartphone users seeking a data‑driven, financially incentivized approach to reduce social‑media consumption and improve digital wellbeing.
Features
- Configurable daily time limits for major social platforms with per‑app granularity
- Monetary staking mechanism that locks funds on the line until compliance is verified
- Automatic usage tracking using iOS/Android accessibility and usage‑stats APIs
- Real‑time compliance verification and instant payout execution via integrated payment processor
- Community prize pool that aggregates forfeited stakes, displayed on a weekly leaderboard
- In‑app dashboard showing remaining time, stake status, and earned rewards
- End‑to‑end encryption of user data and PCI‑DSS‑compliant handling of payment information
- Lightweight UI optimized for quick limit adjustments and status checks