Wipr 2

Wipr is the answer to a question most ad blockers overcomplicate. You pay five dollars, tick one box in Safari's extensions pane, and then never open the app again. There are no filter list subscriptions to curate, no dashboard, no monthly summary of how many trackers it stopped. Blocklists update in the background and that is the entire relationship.

Because it uses Safari's own content blocker API, the rules are compiled once and Safari enforces them — nothing of Wipr is running while you browse, so it costs no memory and no battery. It also means the blocking is invisible in the good sense: pages are just quieter and faster, and breakage is rare.

Five dollars once, covering Mac, iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro, against $30 to $35 a year for the subscription blockers. That is the clearest case on this site, and there is no upgrade treadmill attached — the one caveat being that Wipr 2 itself was a new purchase rather than a free update from Wipr 1, which is roughly a five-dollar tax every several years.

If you want an element picker, per-site rule editing, or blocking inside apps other than Safari, this is not that app — look at 1Blocker, or pay for Wipr's Filtr add-on and accept a subscription.