TouchGrass
A Mac app that reminds you to take breaks, but is smart enough to shut up during your meetings and stop counting a video you're watching as "work" you need a break from.
🔗 Visit TouchGrass
Description
Most break-reminder apps are dumb timers: every 30 minutes they nag you, whether you're deep in a client call, watching a tutorial, or actually grinding through work. That gets annoying fast, which is why most people turn them off within a week. TouchGrass tries to fix this by actually paying attention to what you're doing before it interrupts you.
TouchGrass is a native macOS menu-bar app that detects meetings, media playback and screen recordings and pauses its break reminders during them, while counting genuine idle time away from the Mac as a completed break. On top of scheduling, it adds blink reminders, posture nudges and typing-strain detection, all customizable by frequency, duration and office hours. It requires no Accessibility permission and does all detection locally with no cloud sync or analytics — a deliberate design choice for a tool that's otherwise watching your screen activity all day. It's native Swift code rather than an Electron wrapper, and it's sold as a one-time $3.99 purchase with a 7-day free trial, rather than a subscription.
💬 Our review
The short version: if you've tried break-reminder apps before and abandoned them because they interrupted at the worst moments, TouchGrass's context-awareness (skip meetings, skip media, count real idle time) is the actual fix, and $3.99 one-time is basically an impulse buy.
It competes with older tools like Time Out, Stretchly and Awareness, most of which use simple fixed-interval timers without meeting or media detection — TouchGrass's differentiator is specifically that contextual awareness, plus running fully local with zero permissions beyond the basics, which matters if you're wary of apps that ask for Accessibility access just to nag you about posture. The tradeoff is it's a narrow, single-purpose utility for a problem some people genuinely don't have (if you already take breaks fine, skip it), and the pricing page currently 404s so you have to trust the homepage numbers. Good fit for anyone who's tried and dropped break reminders before; not worth it if you already have a working break routine.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
$3.99 achat unique à vie, essai gratuit 7 jours
Pros
Détecte les réunions et lectures vidéo pour ne pas interrompre au mauvais moment
Traitement 100% local, aucune permission Accessibility requise
Rappels clignement des yeux, posture et fatigue de frappe en plus des pauses
Prix unique très bas ($3.99), pas d'abonnement
Cons
Page de tarification dédiée en 404
Utilité limitée si vous gérez déjà bien vos pauses
macOS uniquement
Pas encore sur l'App Store (à venir)