Terms

Use sift deliberately.

sift is provided as-is, without warranties. You are responsible for choosing what to block and for understanding that a running lockdown is intentionally difficult to end early.

Your Alca account

sift is licensed through an Alca account, which also covers other Alca products. You are responsible for keeping your sign-in details and your license key private. A license key is for your own devices; sharing it is not permitted, and keys are short-lived and renewed automatically, so a shared key stops working.

Subscription and billing

sift costs $4 per month after a 7-day free trial. Payment details are collected when the trial starts, and the subscription begins automatically at the end of the trial unless you cancel before then. It renews monthly until cancelled. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax that may apply where you live. We will give notice before changing the price of an existing subscription.

Cancelling

You can cancel at any time from your Alca dashboard, which opens our payment provider’s billing portal. Cancelling during the free trial ends access shortly afterwards and you are not charged. Cancelling a paid subscription stops future charges, and access continues until the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not delete your blocklists when a subscription ends — they are files on your Mac.

Refunds

The free trial exists so you can decide before paying. If you are charged and believe it was a mistake — a duplicate charge, a cancellation that did not take effect, or a renewal you did not expect — contact us and we will refund it. Beyond that, refunds are at our discretion; we would rather fix the problem than argue about four dollars.

Payments

Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your full card details. See our privacy policy for what is shared.

System access

sift installs a privileged helper and network extension to enforce the sessions you request. Use the in-app uninstall command to remove these components.

Acceptable use

Do not use sift to interfere with another person’s device or access without their informed permission.

Availability

The local blocker is designed to keep working without the web service, but compatibility can change with macOS and browser updates. Licensing and billing depend on our web service; if it is briefly unavailable, an active license keeps working through a grace period rather than failing immediately.

Ending your access

We may suspend an account used to abuse the service, reverse payments in bad faith, or share license keys. Where it is not obviously deliberate, we will contact you first.

Contact

For billing, refunds or questions about these terms, email erik@alcahq.com.

Last updated August 5, 2026.