A daily screen time allowance for your own PC. Whatever you don't use doesn't vanish — it rolls over.
Monkey is a small Windows tool for people who'd like to spend less time staring at a screen, without relying on willpower alone. When your time runs out, Monkey signs you out. Anything that adds time or pauses the limit needs a master password.
Because monkey has had enough.
Enough of endless feeds engineered by very smart people whose actual job is to keep monkey scrolling. Enough of opening the laptop "for five minutes" and resurfacing two hours later with nothing to show for it. No more tralalero tralala, no more bombardiro crocodilo. Monkey does not need to know what the tung tung tung sahur is. Monkey wants his afternoon back.
So monkey put a lock on the door and gave the key to a friend.
Most screen time tools hand you the same thing every day: two hours today, two hours tomorrow. Skip a day and you get nothing for it. Burn through it by lunch and your evening is gone.
Monkey treats it like a Piggy Bank instead:
- Every day a fresh allowance lands in the account (30 minutes by default).
- Whatever you don't spend stays there and piles up — up to a cap.
- Being frugal actually pays off: a few quiet days fund the long film evening on Saturday.
That's the part that matters. You're not just being capped, you're learning to budget — and the limit stops feeling like a punishment, because you never lose time, you only move it.
The second idea is not doing this alone. Give the master password to someone you trust. Then "just five more minutes" isn't an argument with yourself at 1am.
- Shows your remaining time in a small overlay in the top right. Hide it, recolour it, drop the background so only the number floats there. Click it to open the control panel. Hover it to see the other number (time used vs. time left).
- Warns you in good time — 10 minutes left by default — with a window that never steals focus, so it won't eat your keystrokes or tab you out of a game.
- Signs you out when the balance hits zero, with a grace period to save your work.
- Counts fairly. The clock stops while the session is locked or the screensaver is on, and sleep costs you nothing.
- Doesn't let itself be switched off in passing. The service guards itself and puts its locks back after every start.
There is one file: ⬇ Download MonkeySetup.exe — always the newest release. The service and the display are tucked inside it.
- Download it, double-click, and say yes to the Windows prompt.
- Pick Install, choose your daily allowance, set a master password. Done.
To remove it: run the same file and pick Remove — it asks for the master password.
Requires the .NET 8 Desktop Runtime (Windows 10/11, 64-bit). If it's missing, Windows offers the download on first launch.
Older versions are on the releases page.
The build straight from the current source lives in
dist/MonkeySetup.exe — that one is rebuilt on every
change and hasn't necessarily been through a release.
Fixed when you install (can't be changed afterwards):
| Top-up limit | 4 hours per go — repeatable, but never more in one shot |
Changeable any time in the control panel (double-click the tray icon; needs the master password):
| Default | |
|---|---|
| Daily allowance | 30 minutes |
| Balance cap | 240 minutes |
| Warning at | 10 minutes left |
| Grace before sign-out | 90 seconds |
| Buffer after signing in with an empty balance | 120 seconds |
The cap matters more than it looks. Without it, one long holiday leaves you with a balance so fat the whole thing stops meaning anything.
| Control panel | Double-click the tray icon, or click the overlay |
| Show/hide overlay | Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T |
| See the other number | Hover the overlay |
| Change how it looks | Right-click the tray icon |
Being honest about how far this goes: on Windows a local administrator isn't a security boundary — that's Microsoft's own position, and no program without a signed kernel driver changes it (commercial tools included). So Monkey leans on lots of small locks that keep putting each other back up. Getting around it is possible, but it takes deliberate effort rather than a moment of weakness. That's exactly the bar we're aiming for.
git clone https://github.com/fcspcs/Monkey.git
cd Monkey
.\build.ps1 # produces dist\MonkeySetup.exeNeeds the .NET 8 SDK. The installer in dist/ is rebuilt automatically on every
change, and pushing a tag like v1.1 publishes it as a release (GitHub Actions).
The source code is MIT — see LICENSE.
The images in assets/ are memes and are not mine, so they're not
covered by the MIT licence. If you reuse this project, bring your own artwork —
assets/make-icon.ps1 turns any PNG into the icon the build needs.