What is a fair exchange rate for screen time?
Every trade in MoveFirst is the same simple exchange: effort on one side, minutes in the apps you love on the other. Here is how the default rates work, what the three tiers actually ask of you, and how to choose a starting point you will not resent.
Effort on one side, minutes on the other
MoveFirst runs on one idea. You pick the apps that should wait behind a calm block screen, and movement buys the minutes that open them. Those minutes go into a bank, you spend them, and when they run out the block quietly returns. Every rate in the app is a version of the same trade: a handful of push-ups, a short walk, a stretch of focus on one side; time in the apps you chose on the other.
A fair rate, then, is not the strictest one you can imagine. It is the one you will still honor on an ordinary Tuesday evening, when the couch is winning. The rates below are defaults, not verdicts — every number is editable.
The default rates, in plain numbers
The quickest way to earn is a camera-counted move — counted live on your phone, never recorded, never sent. One push-up buys one minute. Ten squats, fifteen sit-ups, or twenty-five jumping jacks each buy five minutes, and a thirty-second plank buys three. Ten moves are on the roster: push-ups, squats, sit-ups, jumping jacks, plank, jump squats, lunges, high knees, mountain climbers, and a one-foot balance.
If you would rather leave the camera out of it, the other routes are equally valid ways to earn. A three-minute walk, measured by the step counter, buys ten minutes. A sixty-minute focus session — leaving the phone alone with everything blocked — buys fifteen. And if you opt in, your daily Apple Health steps convert on their own: every 1,000 steps become five minutes, up to thirty a day, with no session needed. For the full picture of how a session flows, see how it works on the how-it-works page.
Three tiers, one tap
You do not have to tune ten rates by hand. Three one-tap tiers set the whole exchange at once, and squats make the difference easy to see. Ease me in asks five squats for five minutes. Standard asks ten. Challenge asks twenty. Same minutes, different price.
The honest advice: the tier you keep matters more than the tier you pick. A rate you meet most days builds the exchange into your routine; a rate you dread teaches you to avoid the app instead.
Why the bank has a ceiling
Earned minutes land in a bank with a cap — sixty minutes by default, adjustable anywhere from fifteen to 240. The ceiling is deliberate. Without one, a single big workout could bankroll days of uninterrupted scrolling, and the exchange would quietly stop meaning anything.
The cap keeps the loop short and alive: move a little, spend a little, move again. Minutes are meant to be spent, not hoarded, and a modest ceiling is what makes that true.
Stopping early still counts
Credit is pro-rated and rounded up to the nearest thirty seconds, so stopping halfway still earns the time you moved for. If you planned twenty squats and stopped at twelve, the twelve count. That is not a loophole — it is the point. An exchange that punishes an honest attempt trains you to stop trying.
There are also no streaks to lose. Momentum grows with any activity and cools gently, and it never resets to zero. A quiet day slows things down; it does not erase anything.
Picking a starting point, kindly
Start gentler than you think you should. Ease me in exists precisely so the first week feels almost easy — the goal at the beginning is to make the exchange normal, not to make it hard. Once paying the rate feels routine, tighten it: nudge squats from five to ten, trim what a walk pays, lower the bank cap.
Nothing here is fixed. Every rate, the tier, and the cap can change whenever your sense of fair changes — strictness is something you grow into, not something you owe from day one. The three-day trial is enough time to live with a tier and find out which one is yours; pricing details are in the pricing section on the homepage.
MoveFirst is finishing its final test round. It is not on the App Store yet.