❓ Problem

Online shopping has removed almost every useful moment of friction. TikTok shows you the product, Apple Pay remembers your card and Buy Now, Pay Later makes a €200 purchase feel like four harmless €50 decisions. One minute you are watching a skincare routine; the next you are tracking a parcel containing a red-light mask you will use twice.

This is not a tiny fringe behaviour. A meta-analysis estimated compulsive buying affects 4.9% of adults - roughly one in twenty - with higher rates among university students. Meanwhile, 15% of US adults used Buy Now, Pay Later in 2024, and almost one-quarter of those users made a late payment. For 58%, BNPL was the only way they could afford the purchase.

The tools trying to help arrive too late. Budgeting apps record the transaction after the money is gone. Banking alerts tell you that you spent €84 at Zara, which is useful if you have recently suffered amnesia. Shopping blockers add friction, but they do not replace the small reward users get from buying something.

Here is the opportunity: make resisting a purchase feel better than completing one.

✅ Solution

A mobile game for completing no-buy and low-buy challenges. Users protect a limited number of hearts, defeat tempting purchases and build a visible “money rescued” score.

• Choose your challenge. Users select the categories causing trouble - clothes, beauty, gadgets, takeaway or everything non-essential - and set clear rules for a seven, 30 or 90-day season.
• Start each week with five hearts. Breaking one of your rules costs a heart, but does not erase the entire streak. The system makes lapses meaningful without turning one bad purchase into permission to abandon the challenge.
• Defeat individual temptations. Share a product into the app, add its price and start a cooling-off timer. If the user still wants it after 24 or 72 hours, they can reconsider. If they walk away, the product is marked defeated and its price joins their money-rescued total.
• Convert restraint into progress. Every resisted purchase earns XP, upgrades the player’s character and moves money towards a real goal such as a holiday, emergency fund or debt repayment.
• Play with a small squad. Friends can complete a no-buy season together, send spare hearts and intervene when somebody is about to crack over a limited-edition water bottle.

The product should feel more like Duolingo than a spreadsheet. The user is not logging every transaction. They open it during the exact moment when they are deciding whether to buy.

📊 Key Numbers

Market and behaviour

• Compulsive buying has an estimated pooled prevalence of 4.9% among representative adult populations and 8.3% among university students. That validates a substantial high-need audience, although not everyone in that group will want or benefit from an app.
• US retail e-commerce sales reached an estimated $1.23 trillion in 2025, up 5.4% year-on-year and accounting for 16.4% of retail sales. The temptation machine is still getting larger.
• I Am Sober has more than 184,000 US App Store ratings and already supports online shopping as one of its trackable behaviours. That is strong evidence that people use mobile products to track abstinence, savings and triggers.
• The direct niche is much earlier. No-buy app mallow currently shows 40 US App Store ratings, suggesting genuine demand but no clear category winner yet.

Unit economics