Getting Started With Limiter

You limit time spent on websites with Limiter by installing the free Chrome extension, adding the domains that cost you afternoons, and giving each one a daily minute allowance. While you browse, a floating countdown shows the minutes left; when the allowance hits zero, the browser redirects to a block screen and the site is done until tomorrow.

What Limiter is

Limiter is a free, deliberately small Chrome extension by Degird — 26.66 KiB, no account, and 100% local. It exists for the gap between doing nothing and a full site blocker: the sites you genuinely need sometimes, but want in smaller doses. A budget, not a ban.

The reasoning matters, because it predicts whether the tool will stick. Infinite feeds are built without stopping cues — nothing tells you the session is over, which is why "just five minutes" reliably becomes forty. Full blockers restore the stop but create an all-or-nothing fight: the day you legitimately need the site, you disable the blocker, and it stays disabled. A daily allowance removes that failure mode. The site still works; it simply runs out.

Privacy is structural rather than promised: everything happens locally on your device. Your domain list, time counters, and browsing history are never transmitted anywhere — there is no server to send them to.

Your first limit

Install Limiter from the Chrome Web Store, then open the dashboard with Alt + Shift + L. Add one domain — the one you already know — and set its daily minutes. That is the entire setup; the extension runs itself from here, every day.

From your next visit to that site, the floating overlay shows the remaining minutes while you browse. It is deliberately non-intrusive — it covers nothing and interrupts nothing — but it is always visible, which restores exactly the stopping cue feeds are designed to remove. Most sessions end on their own once the number is in front of you; the block screen handles the ones that do not.

Choosing good budget numbers, and adjusting them over time, is covered in setting daily limits. Why the timer cannot be dodged with subpaths or endless scrolling is covered in how time tracking works.

Next steps

• Choose budgets you will actually keep
• Understand the tracking under the hood