About Stub Out
Stub Out is made by one person: me, Robert. I write the app, the guides on this blog, and the replies to your support emails. There is no content team and no marketing department — which is either reassuring or alarming, depending on how you feel about the typos.
Why I'm not going to lecture you
I quit smoking around 500 days ago and I have not had a cigarette since. That's the good news, and it's the smaller half of the story.
Here's the rest. For most of those 500 days I told people I'd quit. I hadn't. I'd moved onto nicotine pouches, then added a vape, and decided that since neither involved smoke, neither really counted. I dropped the pouches about a month ago and the vape about two weeks ago. So I'm well over a year off cigarettes and roughly a fortnight off nicotine — and those are very different numbers.
I could have written a bio that just said "quit 500 days ago" and left it there. It would have been technically true and completely misleading, and it would have made this whole site worse. Because the useful thing I have isn't a clean success story — it's a detailed, recent memory of the parts where it goes wrong. Day three. The first coffee. The self-negotiation your brain runs at 11pm when there's a shop still open. The way "I've switched to something less bad" quietly becomes a year.
That's what Stub Out is built around, and it's why the guides here don't open with a list of health consequences you already know. You're not here because you're missing information. You're here because the hard part is hard.
What that means for what you read here
Two things I try to hold to:
The experience parts are mine. When a guide describes what a craving does to your attention span, or why the hands are worse than the lungs, that's first-hand. I'm not paraphrasing a pamphlet.
The factual parts are sourced. Anything about timelines, withdrawal, nicotine chemistry or health outcomes is linked to a primary source — the NHS, smokefree.gov, the CDC or the FDA. If I can't source a claim, I either cut it or say plainly that it's my own experience. Those two categories never get blended together to sound more convincing.
This is not medical advice
I'm a developer, not a doctor, and nothing here has been reviewed by a clinician. It's a mix of well-sourced public health information and the practical experience of someone who has come off three different nicotine products and got the withdrawal wrong more than once on the way.
That's genuinely useful for the day-to-day of quitting. It is not a substitute for talking to a professional — and for nicotine replacement therapy, prescription medication, or quitting while pregnant or with a heart condition, please do talk to a pharmacist or doctor. They are free in most countries and considerably better at this than a blog.
The app
Stub Out turns quitting into something you can see. Your streak, your savings and your cravings beaten get a scoreboard — and your addiction gets a face: Nik, a smug cartoon cigarette, vape or pouch who visibly falls apart the longer you hold the line. It sounds silly. That's the point. Willpower is fragile and abstract; wanting to beat a specific smug little villain turns out to be surprisingly durable.
Your data stays on your device — there are no accounts and no server storing anything about you. See the Privacy Policy.
Get in touch
Corrections, disagreements, bug reports and "you got this wrong" emails are all welcome — especially corrections. I read every one.
📮 info [at] stubout [dot] app