The promise
What happens to the archive
Pocket Chronicle is an ad free childhood memory app, and that phrase is doing more work than it looks like. It means there is no second customer. Nobody is buying access to your child, now or at a bigger scale, which is why the rest of this page can say what it says.
This page exists because you shouldn't have to find any of it out later.
01
An ad-free childhood memory app: no ads, no data sale
Not now, not at a bigger scale, not ever. Nothing about your child is sold, brokered, or used to train anything. There is no advertising on any tier, including the free one.
Some apps in this category show advertising next to your child's photos. This one never will. That isn't a feature we're withholding for a higher plan — it's a business model we didn't pick, and picking it later would require rewriting this page, which is rather the point of writing it.
Sign in with Apple, with Google, or with a link sent to your email address. There is no Facebook login, because routing a private record of a child through an ad company contradicts the thing being sold.
02
Private by default
The archive is private unless you invite someone. There is no feed, no likes, no discovery, and no follower count. Nobody outside the people you name can see any of it.
03
If you stop paying
The full version, because this is the part everybody gets burned by.
Your archive is never locked
Pocket Chronicle drops to the free tier. Nothing you wrote or captured is ever locked behind payment: the whole archive stays readable, searchable and exportable. You keep answering the daily question — text and did-it entries never stop. The missions go back to being part of membership, and so does adding new photographs, video and voice recordings. Membership buys more of the day; it has never bought access to your own archive and never will.
Nothing ages out today
Stopping paying doesn't start a clock on your photographs, video or recordings. An archive that has been both unpaid and unopened for years costs money to store, and we expect to eventually move older originals to slower storage — never text, and never before this page says so. None of that is built, so none of it is written here as though it were.
We never delete a word you wrote unless you ask us to.
Lapsing doesn't cost you a sentence, and neither does going quiet for a year. The one thing that removes your words is you asking us to close your account — and that waits seven days, signs you out, and is cancelled outright the moment you sign back in.
If we ever need to age out media from an archive that has been both unpaid and unopened for years, this page changes first, you get an email and a free export of the whole archive before it could apply to you, and signing in once cancels it. It will never touch a word you wrote. None of that is built today, and we would rather say so than describe a safeguard you can't yet hold us to.
No marketing email ever enters one of those warning windows. A deletion notice with an upsell in it is the worst possible version of this product.
04
If we go away
The honest one. Pocket Chronicle is being built by one person. It might not be here in twenty years, and an archive that assumes otherwise is lying to you.
So the export isn't a compliance checkbox, it's the actual design. One tap gives you a
zip: every entry, every photo, every recording, in folders by date, plus an
index.html you double-click. Plain files, plain folders, a viewer that runs
offline from a double-click with no server and no internet. It was written to be opened
in twenty years by someone who has never heard of us.
An export that needs a server isn't an archive. It's a hostage with visiting hours.
Free, complete, always. Even on the free tier. Even if you stopped paying years ago. The formats are the boring ones on purpose — JPEG, MP4, M4A, plain text and HTML — because boring formats with billions of files in them are the ones the world can't afford to lose. The long version of that argument is here.
05
What we'd never build
Shorter than the rest, and the most useful list on this page.
- ✓No streaks. No counter that punishes a parent for a hard week. The whole argument.
- ✓No guilt notifications. Nothing that says you're behind, because you can't be.
- ✓No public feed. Nothing that makes your child's archive a place other people perform.
- ✓No ads, at any scale. Including the version where it's only on the free tier and only small.
- ✓No export you have to ask for. Or wait for, or pay for, or open an account to read.
06
Where we're weak
A trust page that only lists strengths isn't one. Pocket Chronicle is iPhone only. There is no Android app and no web app. There is no printed book. It arrived on the App Store on September 7, 2026, so there is very little history behind it — and there are no reviews and no testimonials on this site, nor will there be invented ones, which for a product selling trustworthiness is the single unrecoverable mistake.
It's one developer. If that's disqualifying, that's a reasonable call, and the export exists precisely so it doesn't have to be a permanent one.
None of this needs an account to try
The app is a free download, the prompts are free to read and free by email, and all 133 are published whether you install anything or not.
Free on iPhone. The daily question is free forever, and the first two weeks are open with no card.