The Most Dangerous Writing App lets you delete all of your work for free

The Most Dangerous Writing App, from developer Manuel Ebert, is a writer’s block tool with a twist. The free web app lets you jot down words of any fashion in timed increments ranging from five minutes to an hour. If you stop typing, however, all progress is lost. It’s meant to simulate the act of writing under extreme pressure, and it definitely works so long as you’re willing to write some pure nonsense in the event nothing of substance comes to mind.

Ebert’s service appears to be a repackaging of Flowstate, a $15 Mac app released back in January that functions in a nearly identical way. He even calls it The Most Dangerous Writing App, which is a direct reference to the words displayed on Flowstate creator Overman’s website. The difference: Ebert’s app is free, which could help it take off among the admittedly niche community of writers looking for self-deleting online notebooks.

So in a way, The Most Dangerous Writing App is to Flowstate what the free web game 2048 was to mobile puzzler Threes. By cloning the core concept of Threes into a free version, 2048 became a massively popular time-waster for a brief few weeks back in spring of 2014. The developers of the $2.99 Threes were upset by the whole ordeal, but ultimately changed up their business model for the game in future releases. There isn’t as much on the line with writing apps as there is with viral mobile games. But it’s yet another lesson in the perils of charging for software that others may be able to easily replicate.