About
I built this for people like me.
My name is Sam, and I built Escape. The whole point of Escape is that what happens inside your head doesn't have to be public, and I hold to that same privacy myself. The contract starts with me.
I built Escape alone. One person designing, writing, and shipping, full-time — eight hours a day, including weekends. I've been working on it for about a year. I'm going all in.
Why I built it
I had this for more than a decade. Not the worst version, but the kind that sits in the background and quietly eats at things — focus, motivation, pieces of relationships. I relapsed many times. I tried the stuff that was supposed to work, and most of it didn't. The apps that yelled at me. The ones that ranked me on a leaderboard. The ones that turned recovery into a video game where the streak was the only score.
I watched friends go through it too. The single ones. The married ones. The ones in serious relationships. It wasn't one type of person — it was all of them. Quietly, alone, not talking about it.
And then sexualized content kept getting more everywhere — not just on the sites people went to find it, but on the social-media feeds of everyone. The line between "porn" and "what the algorithm serves you" kept blurring.
I started building Escape before this gets worse. Synthetic content is about to take the next step — personalized images, personalized videos, made on demand from whatever a model is told to make. The version of this problem we have today is the easy version. I wanted something honest in the world before the harder version arrives.
Where I am now
I'm mostly on the other side. Not finished — I still deal with it sometimes — but nowhere near where I used to be. The apps and websites I used along the way are part of why. I wanted to make something that paid that forward. I'm going to tell you what I would have wanted someone to tell me when I started.
The voice is plain because that's what I needed at 11pm on a Tuesday, alone with the phone. Nothing motivational-poster, nothing performative, nothing that asks you to perform masculinity at us.
If you want to say something
Write to support@escapethegrip.com. I read every email. I usually take a few days.