How it works
Pocket Chronicle is a daily prompt journal for parents. One question and one small mission arrive each morning; you answer in about fifteen seconds, one-handed, and the answer is filed with the question that caused it. That last part is the whole product.
The question is free, every day, forever. The mission is part of membership — one on a weekday, two at the weekend — and so are the weekly mission, the monthly measurement and the sealed letters below. This page describes the whole day, so it says so here rather than leaving you to find out on the pricing page. Nothing you write or capture is ever locked behind payment.
So here is how it actually goes — laid out the way Pocket Chronicle lays out everything: on a timeline. It runs from tomorrow morning to the morning they turn eighteen, and backwards over every month that already happened.
Tomorrow · 7:00 a.m.
The morning card
The day's prompts are written before you wake up. One notification carries them, at a time you pick — seven in the evening unless you change it. Open it and there is the day's question — and, with membership, a mission beside it. Not a feed, not a dashboard, not eleven things you're behind on.
There are four kinds you'll see most days — a question, a capture mission, an activity with nothing to upload, and occasionally a letter. All 133 are published, so you can read every one before you sign up for anything.
What did they do today that annoyed you and will be funny in ten years?
Photograph their hands. Just their hands.
Fifteen seconds later
The four ways to answer
The fifteen-second claim is a real constraint, not a slogan. You don't choose between these — the prompt does. A question opens on a text field, a photo mission opens the camera, a voice mission opens the recorder, and an activity is one tap. The + button is where you pick for yourself.
Camera opens on the card. Shoot, keep, done. The prompt is attached before you've put the phone down.
PhotoTap to record, up to ten minutes. Tap again to pause — what you have already recorded is safe either way. On iOS 26 it is transcribed on your phone, so the words are searchable — and either way the audio never leaves for a transcription service. On an older iPhone the recording is saved the same way, without a transcript.
Tell me the dinosaur one again. No, the loud dinosaur one. VoiceTwo sentences is plenty. Most entries are shorter than this paragraph.
He asked if the moon follows only our car. I said yes. WrittenThat week · that month
Missions: daily, weekly, monthly
This is the part membership adds — one mission on a weekday, two at the weekend. Most days it's small. Once a week something slightly bigger lands — take them somewhere neither of you has been, or build something together that needs more than one sitting. Once a month something asks for a number — height, hand, foot, the things you'll want on a chart later and will never reconstruct from memory — or sends you back through this month last year in your camera roll.
Monthly
Trace their hand on paper and photograph it.
Whenever you get to it
Backdating, which is normal here
The day something happened and the day you got around to writing it down are two different facts, and Pocket Chronicle keeps both. File a memory under the day it happened, whenever you get to it. Nothing marks it as late, because it isn't.
This is also the answer to “my kid is seven, is it too late?” — no. Plenty of a real archive will be older than the app that holds it. Look back walks your camera roll month by month and shows you the months with photographs and nothing written. It reads dates and counts on your phone and uploads nothing until you pick one.
Year three
The timeline
Everything lands in one place, grouped by date, with their age stamped on every day header. You are never doing arithmetic to work out whether he was three or four.
Year nine
Search, and why the prompt matters
Search runs across everything you wrote, every caption you added, and every transcript of something they said. And because every entry keeps the prompt that caused it, what comes back arrives with the question attached. That last part is what nothing else has.
Searching a camera roll means searching dates, places and whatever the machine thinks it sees. Searching Pocket Chronicle means searching your own answers — “afraid of”, “pretending to be”, “wouldn't let us correct” — and every one that comes back carries the question that asked for it, which is much closer to how you'll actually remember it in twenty years.
Any given night
Letters, sealed until an age you pick
Some prompts ask you to write forward — a letter to who they'll be at eighteen, or what you'd want them to know if you weren't around to say it. You choose when it opens. A letter meant for eighteen stays shut until eighteen.
Every day in between
Second parent, one archive
The second parent is part of membership, and it's one membership, not two — both of you answer into the same archive. Whoever was there that day writes it down. Neither of you has to reconstruct the other's week.
Year eighteen
Export, which is the actual promise
One tap gives you a zip: every entry, every photo, every recording, in folders by date —
plus an index.html you double-click. It opens in any browser, offline, with
no account and no internet. No app required, including this one.
Free, complete, always. Even on the free tier. Even if you stopped paying years ago. It's built that way because an archive meant to last eighteen years shouldn't depend on this company lasting eighteen years. The rest of that promise is here.
A daily prompt journal for parents, starting tomorrow
Pocket Chronicle is on the App Store, free to download, on iPhone. The prompts also come by email for anyone who'd rather answer in a notebook — and backdating means an answer you wrote on paper still files under the day it happened.
Free on iPhone. The daily question is free forever, and the first two weeks are open with no card.