The best free site blocker for freelancers

Most "best blocker" lists are just feature dumps. This one is written for one specific person: the freelancer who sat down to send an invoice and is somehow still scrolling two hours later. The question is not "which blocker has the most settings," it is "which one actually gets me back to the work." We will go through the popular free options honestly, including ours.

1. StayFocusd

The classic free Chrome blocker. You give each site a daily time budget, and once it is used up, the site is blocked for the rest of the day. It is simple, free, and has been around forever.

Good for: capping time on a few sites. Weak spot: a time budget is easy to rationalize ("just five more minutes"), and it does nothing to push you toward the work you are avoiding.

2. LeechBlock NG

Free, open source, and extremely configurable, custom block sets, time windows, day-of-week rules, password locks. If you love settings, you will love LeechBlock.

Good for: power users who want fine-grained control. Weak spot: the configuration is a project in itself, and like all schedule blockers it walls sites off without connecting blocking to getting work done.

3. Freedom

Polished and cross-device, it blocks sites and apps across your laptop, phone, and tablet on a schedule. The catch for this list: it is a paid subscription, not a free tool. Worth it if your problem is your phone.

Good for: blocking everywhere, including mobile. Weak spot: not free. See WorkflowGate vs Freedom.

4. Cold Turkey

A desktop app with a free tier and a paid Pro version. Its strength is strictness: blocks that are very hard to bypass, plus desktop-app blocking and scheduling.

Good for: people who need to be fully locked out. Weak spot: it is a heavier desktop install, and the strictness can feel like punishment. See WorkflowGate vs Cold Turkey.

5. WorkflowGate

Our take, and the reason we built it. WorkflowGate is a free Chrome extension that flips the model: instead of walling sites off on a timer, it keeps them blocked during your work hours until you finish the one work task you have been avoiding, then opens them for a timed break. The blocker shows you the actual task ("send invoice #42"), and doing it is what unlocks the scroll.

For freelancers specifically, that framing matters. The thing you are avoiding is usually the thing that gets you paid, the invoice, the follow-up, the proposal. WorkflowGate makes the break something you earn by doing exactly that. It is free, stores everything locally with no account, and keeps honest escape hatches (a few skips a week) so it never traps you.

Good for: freelancers who scroll instead of doing the work that pays. Weak spot: browser only, it cannot block your phone, and the self-set task means it works best when you actually want to get the work done.

So which is the best free site blocker for freelancers?

If you just want a time cap, StayFocusd is the simplest free option. If you want maximum control, LeechBlock is the most powerful free one. If your distraction is your phone, Freedom is worth paying for. If you need an unbreakable lock, Cold Turkey wins.

But if your real problem is that you keep choosing the feed over the work that pays you, a time budget or a wall will not fix the habit, because neither one connects getting back in to doing the work. That is the gap WorkflowGate was built for: it is free, and it makes progress the price of your break.