Upchin vs Cape

The price, and the privacy label

Cape is free to download, its paid plan costs about seven dollars a year, and its App Store privacy label is a single line: Data Not Collected. Their policy spells it out: no third-party analytics, no advertising, no attribution, and by their own account no third-party code at all, every feature built directly on Apple's APIs.

It also blocks for real, naming Apple's Family Controls frameworks explicitly, and it has two things that are rare in this field: native map zones that start a block when you cross their edge, and a block screen you can write yourself.

Few pages on this site set two apps this close together. The table carries the date it was checked.

What Cape has that Upchin does not

It costs a quarter of what we do, and it works for free. On a subscription, Upchin is free and fully featured for 7 days; then it is paid, and you can cancel at any time.

It collects nothing. One line of privacy label, no third-party SDKs, no tokens sent. We keep your Screen Time figures inside Apple's privacy container, which is good, but their posture is simply cleaner. On price and on the label, we are not going to pretend either gap is narrower than it is.

It writes your message on the block screen. Their release notes say you can customise the Pause Screen with your own title and your own message, and Cape is the only other app in this comparison that does it. Upchin keeps up to ten sentences and shows a different one each time — which is what stops a message you wrote yourself from becoming wallpaper. One sentence or ten, the feature is theirs too.

It reaches more phones. iOS 17.4 where we ask for iOS 26 — a choice we stand by, and one that costs you something on an older device — plus the iPad and Apple Vision. It is harder to get around, with Child Mode, an incognito passcode that turns the app into a notepad under pressure, and switches that disable app removal and app installation.

It can bring apps back for a while. A timer temporarily restores hidden apps, then hides them again.

A place you marked, or the walk you took

Cape’s place trigger is the most developed in this comparison. Its Restrict Zone blocks the apps you chose when you enter a zone; its Safe Zone blocks them when you leave one. You drop a point, you set a radius, and iOS watches the region from there. Their own FAQ gives the limit: the block fires only on crossing the boundary. If you cross no edge, nothing happens.

Motion lock has no map. It watches for the moment you set off: GPS confirms displacement of more than 5 metres and only counts it when the margin of error on the reading is smaller than that distance, so indoor GPS drift does not block you while you sit still. No point, no radius, no list of places.

What separates the two is not reliability, it is anticipation. A zone assumes you decided in advance which places deserve a rule; the supermarket aisle and a street in a city you have never been to are not among them. Theirs is better for the office and the library; ours is the only one that works where you did not plan to be. Among the eleven products on this site, Cape and AppBlock are the only ones that start from a place, Upchin the only one that starts from movement — nobody has both.

On the other trigger we are level: Upchin's Delay Lock closes an app after a grace period and reopens it on its own, and Cape has its equivalent in Take a Break, offered after extended use.

Spans, and a lock that holds when nothing is running

Cape's schedules are point-in-time actions: at 9am, hide this group; at 4pm, bring it back. Their own worked examples build an evening block out of two rules, and nothing in their documentation describes a single span that crosses midnight. Upchin's Schedule slots are spans: 11pm to 1am is one slot. Cape allows twelve schedules on the paid plan, which is plenty for most weeks; theirs simply costs one more rule every time an evening has a beginning and an end.

Cape's blocking model is inclusion-based in the same way: you put apps into an App Group and the group gets restricted. Their documentation describes no "everything except" mode — and their Allow Zones are a location feature, not an app allow list, which is very easy to misread. Upchin's "everything except" web lock is permanent: it holds outside any rule or schedule, with nothing running. It has a cost we print in our own app — it blocks web pages inside apps too, and our text tells you not to use the mode if that is too much.

One thing their documentation says twice, two different ways

What follows changes no cell in the table, but it is worth reporting, because the answer depends entirely on which of their pages you read.

Does Cape block websites? Their own pages disagree. Version 4.0.0, released on 11 February 2026, announced that you can "pause entire app categories and web domains"; the privacy policy, updated ten days earlier, describes receiving web domain tokens from iOS. Their live FAQ still answers that Cape "does not support blocking web sites yet, will be provided in a future update".

Both pages are live, but they are not the same age: the FAQ sentence has been unchanged since at least May 2024, archived word for word nearly two years before version 4 existed. It is currently published; it is not currently written.

We are still not scoring Cape on a web blocklist, because nothing after February 2026 repeats the claim: the two releases since say nothing about the web, the App Store description omits it in all nineteen languages, and none of their seven screenshots shows a website picker — the tabs are "Apps, Zones, Schedule and Settings".

The neighbouring row does settle. Sensitive sites means Apple's adult-content filter, and across twenty-two sets of release notes, eleven App Store listings and every page of their site, Cape never mentions it. The cross it carries therefore says no sensitive-content filter is documented — not that none exists.

One label worth not misreading: Cape's "Allow Zones" and "Block Zones" are places on a map, not lists of websites.

The short version

Cape costs a quarter of our price, collects nothing, and runs on iPhones we do not support. Most of what separates us comes down to two things.

Cape if your distraction has an address — an office, a library, a bedroom — if price matters, or if you want the shortest privacy label on the market.

Upchin if it arrives on the way: a block that starts from walking with nothing to pin, slots that are spans rather than two paired rules, a web lock that holds when nothing is running, and an Apple Watch app.