Anti-Charity Apps in 2026: Which Ones Actually Do It

TL;DR: An anti-charity sends your forfeited money to an organization you oppose, and StickK is the only major app that still offers one. The research finds it works slightly better than a normal charity, by about 0.05 percentage points of weekly weight change, which is a real edge and a much smaller one than the framing suggests. Everyone else in this category keeps your money. If you want a consequence without picking a political enemy, try FineStreak free for 7 days, no card required.

Search for an anti-charity app and you land on two articles from 2012 and 2013, StickK's own help pages, and a Reddit thread asking for StickK alternatives. Almost nothing written this decade explains what the mechanic is, who still offers it, or what the evidence actually says.

So here is all three, with every product claim below read from the vendor's own site on the day this was published.

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What Is an Anti-Charity?

An anti-charity is a destination for money you lose. StickK, the platform that popularised the idea, defines it on its own help centre as "an organization whose views you strongly oppose, or one which promotes values that are most contrary to your own."

The mechanic works like this. You create a commitment contract, name a goal, put an amount of money behind it, and choose where the money goes if you fail. Most people choose a charity. The anti-charity option sends it somewhere you would never donate voluntarily.

StickK publishes its list in ideological pairs, which is the detail that makes the design obvious once you see it. America First Action sits opposite Unite the Country. The NRA Foundation sits opposite the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. Americans United for Life sits opposite the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation. PETA sits opposite the Sportsmen's Alliance. The list runs past politics into British think tanks and, at the bottom, rival football clubs: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United each have a fan club on it.

Whatever you believe, something on that list is designed to make you wince. That wince is the product.

The pairing also tells you what the mechanic needs to function. It needs you to hold a strong opinion. Someone with no political attachment and no football team gets a weaker version of the same contract, which matters more than the marketing admits and is covered further down.

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Which Apps Actually Send Your Money to an Anti-Charity?

This is the question the older articles cannot answer, because they were written when StickK was the whole category. The field has grown and moved in a direction those pieces never anticipated.

Every cell below was read from the company's own site or help centre on 2026-08-24.

Two things stand out.

The first is that anti-charity is a StickK feature and has stayed one. None of the other apps in that table has copied it. In a category where every other idea gets cloned within a year, that is worth noticing.

The second is how blunt the newer apps are about keeping the money. Beeminder's FAQ answers the question "You make money from people failing at their goals?" with "Yes, but we make you fail less", and states plainly that "collecting the fees is our business model." Forfeit's site says "For now it is retained by Forfeit. We are building an option to send forfeited money to friends or your own savings."

StepBet is the one honest gap in the table. Its site explains that players bet into a pot and that those who hit their goals "split the pot", so the money clearly flows to the winners. Where a losing player's money ends up is something the page does not spell out, and we are not going to guess at it here.

If you are weighing these against each other on mechanics rather than money destination, StickK alternatives and Beeminder alternatives go through the field app by app.

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Does the Anti-Charity Actually Work Better?

The field's answer is that donating to a cause you hate is a surprisingly powerful motivator. That is a feeling, and there is a real study underneath it that almost nobody quotes.

Lesser, Thompson and Luft published Association Between Monetary Deposits and Weight Loss in Online Commitment Contracts in the American Journal of Health Promotion in 2016. They looked at real online commitment contracts and compared four groups: people who put a deposit toward an anti-charity, toward a charity, toward a friend, and people who put down no deposit at all.

The finding, in their words: "Weight change per week relative to those without deposits was −0.33%, −0.28%, and −0.25% for anti-charity, charity, and friend, respectively."

Read that carefully, because the ordering and the size are telling different stories.

The ordering supports the popular claim. Anti-charity came first, charity second, friend third, running the way loss aversion would predict. Worth one caution: people chose their own deposit destination in this study, and the published figures carry no test showing the gaps between the three destinations are distinguishable from noise. The ordering is suggestive and the question stays open.

The size does not support how hard the claim is usually pushed. The distance between the best destination and the worst was 0.08 percentage points of body weight per week. For someone at 180 pounds, that is roughly a seventh of a pound a week between the most emotionally loaded option available and the mildest one.

The much larger difference in that study is the one the headline buries. Every deposit type beat no deposit. Putting money behind the goal is what tracks with the bigger change. Where the money went afterwards adjusted it at the margin.

That reframing matters if you are choosing an app, because it means the destination is a refinement of the mechanic and the deposit is the mechanic. Do financial penalties change behavior covers the wider evidence on that question, and what is a commitment contract covers the structure all of these apps are built on.

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The Argument Against Anti-Charities

The most interesting thing about this mechanic is that the two best known apps in the category publicly disagree about whether it should exist.

StickK sells it and publishes the list.

Beeminder refuses. Its founder wrote a post arguing that commitment devices should be socially efficient, meaning "the amount of harm caused to yourself is counterbalanced by a greater or equal amount of benefit to someone else, leaving the world no worse than you found it." Measured against that rule, he singles out the competition: "StickK's anti-charities seem the most egregious, actively harming the world."

His logic is that funding a group you consider harmful converts your personal failure into a public cost. The money survives your failure and goes to work on something you believe should not happen.

There is a reasonable counter, which is that the money going somewhere effective is precisely what makes the threat credible, and a threat nobody believes changes nothing. Beeminder's own answer to that is to keep the money itself, which it defends as honest and which is also, by any reading, a business model.

The argument stays open, and you pick a side of it every time you choose a destination. Most people make that choice without ever learning there was an argument at all.

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What If You Cannot Think of an Organization You Hate?

This is the practical wall, and the older articles skip past it entirely.

The anti-charity runs on genuine revulsion. Scan StickK's list, feel nothing, and you have a contract with a weaker consequence than the one you thought you were signing. Worse, you will not find that out until the day you miss, when the money leaves and the second sting never arrives.

Two honest options at that point.

Pick the charity instead. In that study the charity group averaged 0.05 percentage points a week less than the anti-charity group, which is close to nothing for most goals. A deposit you actually respect beats a theatrical one you do not feel.

Or take the destination question off the table. A flat fine charged to your own card has no recipient to agonise over. The money leaves and that is the whole consequence. FineStreak works this way: you set the amount yourself, from $0.10 up to your rank cap, fines unlock at the Committed rank, and the ceiling rises with your rank from $3 to $50. Nothing about it depends on how strongly you feel about a political action committee.

The wider comparison of penalty mechanics lives in apps that fine you for missing habits.

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How to Pick a Consequence That Fits You

There is no ranking here. All five put a real cost on missing, which the research says is the part that works. Pick the one whose sting you will actually feel in month three, when the novelty of the app has worn off and the only thing still operating is the consequence.

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The Honest Summary

The anti-charity was a genuinely clever invention and it is still the most emotionally vivid option in this category. It is also offered by exactly one app in the table above, unsupported by the enormous effect size people attribute to it, and considered unethical by its most direct competitor.

If it fits you, StickK is where it lives and it is cheap to try.

If you read that list and felt nothing, treat that as useful information about yourself. The mechanic runs on a strong opinion, and yours sits somewhere else. The deposit is doing the work, so choose a consequence you will actually feel.

Start a free week if a flat fine sounds closer to the kind of pressure that actually moves you.