Our story
At the end of 2025, a good friend was trying to quit porn. He’s a Christian, was serious about it, and was struggling.
Someone else held his Apple ID password, so his phone was locked down so hard he couldn’t even update it or download a new app. On his computer he ran another blocker that kept getting in the way of his normal work. He put up with it because there was nothing better.
My co-founder and I are both young guys who’ve had seasons where we didn’t want to consume certain content, whether that was social media or porn. So we figured someone must have created a real solution.
We tested every blocker out there. Our friend was right: every one of them could be switched off in a few taps or bypassed with something as simple as a VPN.
So we asked whether it was even possible. Twenty-two developers in a row told us it couldn’t be done. When we showed the 23rd developer the architecture we’d mapped out, he said, “I think I can make this work. If it’s possible, I’ll find a way.” We knew we’d found our man.
Over the next few weeks we tinkered, broke things, and wiped our phones more times than we could count. After hundreds of hours, we cracked it. The first version of HardStop was born, and it only worked on iPhone.
Every platform after that was a similar story. People told us it was impossible, and we built it anyway, device by device. Today HardStop runs on iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows.
Before HardStop existed, there were 7.5 billion devices that had no reliable way to block porn.
Our mission
Our mission has two parts.
- 1
Make quitting easier.
Whatever the thing is, whether it’s alcohol, heroin or porn, stopping can be brutally hard when it’s free and sitting in your pocket. We help by being a barrier between desire and action.
- 2
Keep kids safe online.
We want to protect kids from content that can do real harm, and help parents protect their kids online.
We’re proud to have built the first solution that guarantees zero access to pornography across all major devices. And we’re not stopping here.
To your freedom,Jhi AitkenHardStop Co-founder