Two different problems
Forest is the best-known deterrent app there is: start a timer, a tree grows, leave the app and it withers. That mechanic turns an abstract cost — losing twenty minutes to a feed — into a small visible loss you feel. Roughly 60 million people have used it, and app revenue has funded real trees planted through a reforestation partner. It works because it makes distraction expensive.
DuckDoro never tries to make distraction expensive. It assumes the harder question came first: of everything on your plate, which three things are today, and which one do you least want to start? A withering tree is no help there. You can protect a focus session perfectly and still spend it on the fourth-most-important thing — which is what most productive-feeling bad days actually are.
Side by side, honestly
| Forest | DuckDoro | |
|---|---|---|
| Built to answer | How do I stay off my phone? | What are today’s three things? |
| Core mechanic | A tree grows while you stay in the app, withers if you leave | 3 intents, 1 🐸 frog, timer locked until the frog gets a session |
| Chooses your priority | No — you bring the task | Yes, that is the product |
| Phone blocking | Yes — app blocklists and deep-focus modes | No, none |
| Motivation style | Trees, coins, achievements, friends’ forests | None by design — no streaks, points, or leaderboards |
| If you miss a day | Your forest shows the gap | Nothing happens. There is nothing to break |
| Free tier | Yes, ad-supported | Yes, ads never — the whole method is free |
| Pay once? | Not any more — the one-time Pro was retired; existing owners keep it | Yes — $99 lifetime, still sold |
| Best for | Beating phone compulsion | Beating task avoidance |
Competitor details checked 9 August 2026 and kept general — pricing varies by region and changes over time, so check their site for what's true today.
The pricing change, fairly
Forest used to be a paid download with an optional Pro unlock. In December 2025 the iOS app became a free download — App Store snapshots show $3.99 on 5 December and free by the 11th — and the one-time Pro is no longer sold to new users. What’s there now is a free ad-supported tier plus an optional subscription, Forest Plus, which itself launched back in January 2025. People who bought Pro previously keep it; the company has said so repeatedly.
Recent App Store reviews are genuinely split. Plenty are five stars. A visible minority are long-time users unhappy about meeting ads and upgrade prompts in an app they paid for once — all the features I already paid for is no longer there unless you pay for a plus version
is a representative one-star line. Worth being accurate about two things, though: those complaints overlap with an unrelated redesign people also disliked, and Forest still holds around 4.8 stars across tens of thousands of recent iOS ratings. This is a real grievance among a subset of users, not a collapse.
We’re not going to pretend that makes DuckDoro the answer for a Forest user. It only matters if what you wanted was to pay once and be done — which is the one thing no major focus app in this category still sells. Ours is $99, once, and the free plan has the entire method in it.
Who should keep Forest
- Your real problem is the phone. You know what to work on; you just don’t stay put.
- You want app and site blocking during a session — DuckDoro has none.
- The trees genuinely motivate you, and planting them with friends is part of why it works.
- You want it on Android, as a browser extension, and offline.
Honestly: keep it. Nothing in DuckDoro replaces a blocklist, and we’re not building one.
Who should try DuckDoro
- You can sit still for an hour and still avoid the one task that matters. (Find out why.)
- A dead tree feels like being told off, and you have enough of that. (No streaks here, ever.)
- Your list is the problem, not your willpower. (Task paralysis.)
- You’d rather pay once than hold another subscription.
Or run both, which is a genuinely good setup: DuckDoro to pick the three things and start the frog, Forest to keep your hands off the phone while you do them. One decides, one defends. Try the deciding half in under a minute with First Bite — no account.