We believe you should control technology,

instead of technology controlling you.

We live in the “attention economy,” where your time is taking the place of money. Unpluq empowers you to take control of how you spend your time with the tech devices in your life.

We want you to enjoy life more calmly, joyfully and mindfully. We want you to have more time to focus on what’s meaningful to you.

At Unpluq we design products that help people live a richer life with the devices in their lives, with privacy in mind. We are not storing any of your data: you are not the product.

Our mission

Make it easy for you to make conscious choices about how you use the tech devices in your life every day.

The Unpluq Team

We are a team of engineers and creatives working remotely from Rotterdam and Barcelona, each with a unique connection to the problems Unpluq solves.

By getting rid of digital distractions, our goal is to empower you to focus on the important things in life. We want you to be able to spend your time in the way that’s most meaningful to you.

Our advisors

We love technology and have backgrounds in tech, software, product design and more, but we realized there is an ongoing problem with context switching, how we use our time, and how we feel about the way we used our time at the end of the day.

Sometimes, the activities we spend the most time doing are not only unnecessary but actually bring us very little joy. Mindless scrolling is one of the top offenders. Using our smartphone less is something we strive for, but also struggle with. Each of us has a personal connection to the problem we’re solving.

It all started at the Delft University of Technology. Tim Smits and Jorn Rigter, the first two founders of Unpluq, had trouble concentrating on their studies. “When we had the chance to partake in a course on entrepreneurship, we knew that we wanted to tackle smartphone distraction.”

When starting out on the project, the initial idea was to create a minimalist phone. There were some minimalist phones out there, but they still lacked customizability. All minimalist phones came with pre-installed applications which you couldn’t change. 

However, producing hardware is difficult. Creating a minimalist phone would take us four to five years at least, and even that might be optimistic. So, we started thinking about ways in which we could transform everyone’s smartphone into a minimalist phone. We also realized that the problem wasn’t just limiting access, but actually changing the habits that you have.

This is how the idea of using physical input or key to the phone to switch to a focus mode was born. After some tweaking and lots of design considerations, the decision fell on using the USB-C port of the phone.

In February 2020, The Unpluq Key was launched on Kickstarter, with a goal of €10.000. It was a very thrilling and exciting time. We eventually made the goal, and could start the production. We started refining the hardware design and started working extensively on the Unpluq launcher. Finally, in October 2020, the first Unpluq keys were shipped to our first believers: the Kickstarter backers. We will be forever grateful for their contributions.

In 2021 we released Unpluq 2.0, a software-only version of unpluq which allows us to reach a bigger group of people. Instead of the physical key, Unpluq 2.0 works with unique barriers like shaking your phone for 5 seconds. This distraction barrier makes using distracting apps a conscious choice & helps you to reduce smartphone screen time, saving users 35+ minutes of screen time a day on average.

In 2022, we released the Unpluq Tag, a patented NFC tag that replaces the original Unpluq key and is the most effective habit-changing screentime device we’ve come up with yet. The average person using Unpluq Tag saves 78 minutes a day or 35 waking days a year.

In the same year, our third co-founder, Caroline Cadwell, joined us. Caroline experienced the consquences of context switching, and being always-on at work, realizing there was a problem when 11pm work calls on Friday nights became normal. Together, we’re setting out to help everyone live a healthier life with technology–whether it’s screentime, AR, VR, or something else in the future.

Unpluq started out as a kickstarter project, if you are curious you can see it here. Thanks to all the 263 kickstarter backers without you this wouldn’t have been possible!

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