Haven Docs

Financial protection

Haven Pro Plus.

Blocking gambling sites does not stop someone topping up a balance, moving money to a crypto exchange, or sending a transfer at 3 a.m. Financial protection puts a deliberate pause in front of the money apps the user chooses.

It is opt-in twice: the layer has to be switched on, and each app has to be picked by hand. Haven never guards an app the user did not choose.

Find it at Guard → Financial protection.

The reflection pause#

When a guarded app comes to the foreground, Haven shows a calm full-screen pause instead. It is a moment to notice what is happening — not a wall. The user can go back, or proceed.

The rules around it:

  • Never Haven itself, which would trap the user in a loop.
  • Only apps the user explicitly guarded. Never a blanket block on a category.
  • A short re-intervene window stops the pause firing repeatedly on the burst of window events that a single app switch produces. Repeating the same pause five times in a row is harassment, not help.
  • After someone deliberately proceeds — having reflected, and having unlocked if a PIN is set — there is a grace period so they can actually use their banking app without being interrupted mid-session.
  • While the emergency window is running, Haven does not intervene at all. The user asked for a few unobstructed minutes and gets exactly that.

If the user proceeds through the pause repeatedly, that is recorded, and a paired accountability partner is told.

Choosing which apps to guard#

Three ways:

  • The catalog. A curated, worldwide list of well-known banking, payment, crypto and money-transfer apps, grouped so the user can pick a country first. Guarding still works across countries; the grouping is only to make the list navigable.
  • The installed-app picker. Pick from the apps actually on the phone, so nobody has to type a package name.
  • By package name, for anything else.

The catalog is a convenience only. Guarding works on any package the service sees, and an app that is not installed simply never comes to the foreground, so a longer catalog costs nothing.

The stricter locks#

Three optional commitment devices sit on top of the soft pause. All three are described in full in Locks and cooldowns:

  • Hard lock — "no spending until a date I choose". Extendable, never shortenable.
  • Recurring spending day — money apps open on one fixed day a week or month, and are locked the rest of the time.
  • Emergency unlock — a short window, once a week, for the payment that genuinely cannot wait.

While a hard lock or a recurring lock is active, the financial layer itself cannot be switched off and guarded apps cannot be removed from the list. Otherwise the lock would be one screen away from meaningless.

The pause log#

Every pause is recorded on the device: which app, when, and whether the user went back or proceeded. The screen summarises the recent period so the user can see their own pattern rather than guess at it.

This feeds the weekly "grip" card on the home screen alongside the gambling-block figures.

What this needs, and what it does not#

Financial protection runs on the accessibility service, and only ever on the foreground package name — see Accessibility service.

Specifically, for this layer Haven:

  • reads which app is in the foreground, and nothing else;
  • does not read the contents of any banking, payment or crypto app — not balances, not transactions, not credentials, not screens;
  • does not connect to any bank, does not use any open-banking or account-aggregation API, and holds no financial credentials;
  • sends nothing about the user's finances anywhere. The guarded list, the pause log and the locks live only on the device.

The money figures elsewhere in Haven are numbers the user typed in themselves — see Budget and spending.

If the subscription lapses#

Financial protection is gated on an active Pro Plus entitlement, checked live. If the subscription lapses, the layer stops intervening rather than half-working.

Deliberately, a failed entitlement check never counts as "no subscription". Only a successful answer changes the stored state. Losing signal must not make the pause in front of someone's banking app quietly disappear.