Toll Toll

Doom-scroll gate · v0.2

Every reel costs you.

Toll makes it literal.

One math problem before the next Short, Reel, or feed refresh. Solve it and you pass. Get it wrong and you wait.

Add to browser See how it works

Works with YouTube Facebook Instagram TikTok

What Toll does

R

Reel gate

Blocks scrolls, swipes, arrow keys, and the on-screen next and previous buttons on Shorts, Reels, and TikTok. Video pauses while you solve.

F

Feed cap

YouTube's homepage and Facebook's news feed stop after two screens. Each unlock loads one more. Infinite scroll becomes finite.

L

Escalating lockout

Wrong answers cost more each time: 5s, 15s, 30s, 60s. Button-mashing gets punished. One right answer resets the streak.

P

Control panel

Per-platform, per-mode toggles in the toolbar popup. Keep Shorts gated but let the homepage run free. Changes apply live.

T

Time counter

A small pill in the top-right shows today's time on the site. Reappears every few minutes of active use. Daily totals in the popup.

·

Local-only

Nothing leaves your machine. No servers, no accounts, no telemetry. Two permissions: storage and the four supported hosts.

Open source · MIT

Nothing to hide.
Read every line.

Toll runs entirely in your browser. No server calls, no accounts, no analytics. Don't trust the description; open the source and check. If it does something you didn't expect, that's a bug worth filing.

Star on GitHub Read the source

Auditable end to end

Every event blocker, math prompt, and storage write is in src/. Two permissions: storage and the four supported hosts. That's the whole surface.

No data leaves the browser

Settings and daily time counts live in chrome.storage.local. There is no backend to send them to. Uninstall wipes everything.

Contributions welcome

Reels and feeds change often. Site-detection fixes, new platform scripts, translations, better math. Open an issue or a pull request.

Here's how it looks

Click any shot to open it full-size.

YouTube Shorts with math gate
YouTube Shorts. Swipe blocked, video paused, gate up.
Facebook Reels with math gate
Facebook Reels. Next and previous buttons intercepted too.
Facebook timeline capped by Toll
Facebook feed capped after two screens. Solve to load more.

Install in about two minutes

Pick your browser, follow four steps. No coding, no account, nothing to sign up for.

Download toll-Chrome.zip

Same ZIP for every Chromium browser. About 40 KB.

  1. 1

    Download the ZIP

    Click the Download button above. Save the file, then double-click it to unzip. You'll see a folder named Toll with a manifest.json inside.

  2. 2

    Open your Chrome extensions page

    Copy this address, paste it in the address bar, then press Enter.

    chrome://extensions
  3. 3

    Turn on Developer mode

    Look at the top-right of the extensions page. Flip the Developer mode switch on. A new row of buttons appears.

  4. 4

    Click "Load unpacked" and pick the folder

    In the row that just appeared, click Load unpacked. Select the Toll folder you unzipped in step 1 (the one with manifest.json in it). That's it. Toll is armed.

0 of 4 done

Questions

Does it send any data anywhere?

No. Everything runs in your browser. Toggle state and daily time counts live in chrome.storage.local. Uninstall wipes them.

Why math and not a delay timer?

A timer doesn't stop the reflex. You wait it out. Solving something forces a different mode for a few seconds. That's the whole trick.

Can I disable it on one site but not another?

Yes. The toolbar popup has per-platform toggles, and per-mode too (Shorts on but YouTube home cap off, for example). Changes apply live.

Safari or Firefox?

Not yet. Chromium only for now.

A site changed and it stopped working.

Reel and feed layouts shift often. Open an issue with the URL and what broke.

Break the reflex.

Ninety seconds of intent between you and the next reel.

Download Toll