Locked out without your key?
Open Spark, tap Emergency unlock and hold to confirm. The session ends straight away — no key, no network, no waiting for us. You get five for life and they don’t refill. If you turned on Strict mode, only your Spark can end a session.
Out of unlocks, or Strict mode is on and your Spark is out of reach? Tell us what happened. A person reads every message and replies as soon as they can.
Why they are limited
An unlimited escape hatch is just an unlock button with a guilty name. Within a week it becomes the normal way you get back in, and the product is decoration — which is precisely how most blocking apps fail, one reasonable exception at a time.
Five for life behaves differently. It is unmistakably there when a real emergency arrives, and it is uncomfortable enough to spend that your tired self will usually decide the walk is easier. That discomfort is doing deliberate work. It is the same reasoning that puts the unlock behind a physical key in the first place: the cost has to be real, and it has to be payable.
Five, for life. They do not refill, and Strict mode switches them off. The app shows how many you have left next to the Emergency unlock button, before you spend one — that count is the live one.
When to spend one without hesitating
- The key’s batteries are dead and you need a boarding pass, a ticket, or a map.
- You are away from home and the key is not.
- Someone needs to reach you through an app you have locked.
- Anything that is actually an emergency. That is the entire purpose.
When to walk instead
You are bored. You have a good reason that arrived suspiciously fast. You have already told yourself “just to check one thing”. In those cases the walk is not an obstacle to your goal — it is the goal, and spending an emergency unlock buys you a few minutes of feed at the price of one of only five.
Nobody is going to check. The allowance is finite rather than policed, and the only person who can tell the difference between an emergency and a Tuesday is you. Deciding in advance what counts is worth more than any rule we could write here.
Running low, and losing the key
Running low
Five is all there is: they do not refill, and there is no top-up. Keep them for genuine problems, and if a faulty key or a lost one leaves you stuck, contact us — a person will help.
If you are running low because unlocking without the key has quietly become your routine, the fix is not more unlocks. It is distance: the key is not far enough away. A drawer in another room works; the far side of the same desk does not.
Lost the key entirely
Use an emergency unlock if you have one left, then pair a new Spark. An account holds one Spark at a time, so unpair the lost one in Settings › Sparks first — you need to be unlocked to do that, which is why the emergency unlock comes first. Once unpaired, a found key is no use with your account, and it stores nothing about you. Replacements are on the buy page.
What people ask
How many emergency unlocks do I get?
Five, for life. They don't refill, on a timer or any other way. The app shows how many you have left next to the Emergency unlock button, before you spend one. They are capped so that they can rescue you without quietly becoming your normal way back in.
Do I need the key, or a network, to use one?
Neither. An emergency unlock runs entirely on your phone, so it works with the key lost, flat or three hundred kilometres away, with mobile data off, and on a day our servers are down. Needing us to approve it would make it useless in exactly the situation it exists for.
Can I use one in Strict mode?
No. Strict mode switches emergency unlocks off, by design — while it is on, only your Spark can end a session, and turning Strict mode off needs your Spark too. Leave it off until you are sure you want no way out.
What happens when I run out?
From then on only your Spark can end a session. There is no self-serve top-up. If that leaves you stuck — a faulty key, a lost one — contact us, and a person will help.
I have lost the key. What do I do?
Use an emergency unlock if you have one left, then pair a new Spark. An account holds one Spark at a time, so unpair the lost one in Settings › Sparks before you pair its replacement. The key stores nothing about you, so losing one leaks nothing.
Out of unlocks, or something worse?
Tell us what happened and roughly when. There is no self-serve top-up, but a person reads every message and replies as soon as they can.