--- title: Terms | Pocket Chronicle description: Plain-English terms for the app, the membership and this site: what it costs, how to cancel, what happens if you stop paying, and who owns the archive. url: /terms --- Small print # Terms This is the agreement between you and us, written the way we'd explain it out loud. It covers the app, the membership, and this website. There are no capital letters and no clause numbers, because a document about your child's records shouldn't need a second document to explain it. ## What Pocket Chronicle is Pocket Chronicle is an iPhone app for keeping a private archive about your kid. It asks you a question about them every day, and it files what you answer — the words, the photographs, the recordings — with the prompt that caused it, so it can still be found in twenty years. **You are the account holder, and you are a parent or guardian.** The archive is about your child; the account is yours. Your child does not have a login, and nothing in the app asks them for one. That distinction runs through the whole of this page and the whole of [the privacy page](/privacy.md), and it's the thing that makes this app unusual enough to say twice. You need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and you need to be a parent or guardian of the child you're keeping the archive about. That's the whole eligibility test. ## What stays free The daily question is free, every day, with no end date and no card. So is writing as much as you like, recording their voice, 100 photographs, search across all of it, and a full export of the entire archive. **That is a commitment rather than a teaser** — it has no expiry, it isn't a promotional rate, and we're not holding it open until enough people are inside. [The pricing page](/pricing.md) sets both tiers out line by line so this can be held against us. Membership adds the missions, and with them video, photographs without a limit, letters you seal for later, and your child's other parent writing into the same archive. It buys more of the day. It has never bought access to your own archive and it never will. ## The first two weeks A new account gets two weeks with everything open. **We grant that ourselves, on our own server, the moment the account is made.** It is not an App Store introductory offer, there is no payment method involved, and there is nothing to cancel — when the two weeks are up, the daily question carries on exactly as before and the missions become part of membership. ## Membership, and what it costs $59.99 a year, or $5.99 a month. Both are auto-renewing subscriptions: each one renews at the end of its term, for another year or another month, and goes on renewing until you cancel it. One membership covers the household — every child, both parents — and it is never charged per child. You buy it through the App Store. **The price on the purchase screen is the price that applies** — the two figures above are the United States prices, and Apple sets the local equivalent everywhere else, so what you pay may not be the dollar amount here. If we ever change the price, you'll be told before a renewal is charged at the new one. ## Cancelling, and why we can't do it for you **Cancellation happens in your Apple Account settings, not in this app.** Open the iPhone Settings app, tap your name, then Subscriptions, then Pocket Chronicle, then Cancel. Pocket Chronicle's own Settings screen has a *Manage subscription* row that opens the same Apple screen for you, so you don't have to go looking — but the screen is Apple's either way, and so is the decision it records. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for; the membership runs until then. If your household has two parents on it, that row only appears for the one who bought the membership. Apple ties a subscription to the Apple Account that paid for it, and we can't move it to the other parent — they'd have to cancel and buy their own. That's the honest answer to most of the questions we get, so here is the rest of it: **Apple handles the billing, the renewals, the cancellations and the refunds — not us.** We never see your card. We can't charge it, we can't stop it charging, and we can't refund it. Refund requests go to Apple at [reportaproblem.apple.com](https://reportaproblem.apple.com). If you write to us instead, we'll tell you that and help you find the screen — we'd just rather you knew before you needed it than after. We don't get to make cancelling hard, and we wouldn't want the version of this business that did. ## If you stop paying The account drops to the free tier. It is not closed, nothing in it is taken away, and **we delete nothing.** - **Nothing you wrote or captured is ever locked behind payment.** Every entry stays readable, searchable and exportable, whether you pay or not. - **Text never stops.** The daily question keeps arriving, and written and *did it* entries carry on without a limit. - **The missions go back to being part of membership**, which is the whole of what changes on the day a membership ends. - **Your photographs, videos and recordings stay where they are.** Stopping paying does not start a clock on them. **We never delete a word you wrote unless you ask us to.** The only thing that removes anything from your archive is you asking us to close your account, below. If that ever changes — if we ever need to age out media from archives that have been both unpaid and unopened for years — **we will say so on this page and email you before it applies to you**, and it will never touch a word you wrote. ## Who owns what's in here You do. Every entry, photograph, video and recording in your archive is yours, and putting it into Pocket Chronicle doesn't change that by a word. **We claim no ownership of any of it.** We don't licence it to anyone, publish it, put it in a feed, sell it, or hand it to a data broker. **We do not use it to train models** — not ours, not anyone else's. The only permission we take is the boring one we need to run the thing: storing your files, moving them between your phone and our servers, making whatever smaller copy is needed to show them to you, and handing them back to you and to anyone you have invited. That permission ends when the content does. ## Taking it all out There's a full export, and it's free on every tier including the free one. It's a zip of ordinary files in folders by date, plus an `index.html` that opens in any browser, offline, with no account and no server. It was written to be opened in twenty years by someone who has never heard of us. [The longer version of that promise is here.](/promise.md) ## Closing your account You can ask us to close your account from inside the app — Settings, then the card at the bottom. It waits seven days before anything is destroyed, signs you out immediately, and is cancelled outright the moment you sign back in. Somebody who signs back in has changed their mind, and we'd rather read it that way round. **What it removes depends on whether you are the only parent on the archive.** If you are, it takes the lot: your account, your children, every entry, and the photographs, videos and recordings themselves out of storage. If your child's other parent is still on the archive, it removes you — your account, your sign-in, your place on the household — and leaves the archive with them. A shared archive isn't one parent's to destroy, and they didn't ask for anything. One consequence of that worth saying out loud, because it surprises people: **in a two-parent household the entries you wrote stay in the archive after you go.** Your name comes off them and your account is gone, but the words your child's other parent has been reading for years don't vanish out from under them. If that isn't what you want, the thing to do is talk to them, not to us. Take the export first if you want your own copy. Once a deletion has run there is nothing left for us to hand back. **One thing we're not going to overstate.** This is the newest part of the product, and the piece that carries out the deletion on a schedule is not fully in service yet. Ask us to close your account and the request is filed and honoured — but if you want it confirmed to you in writing, email [hello@pocketchronicle.app](mailto:hello@pocketchronicle.app) and a person will do it by hand and tell you when it's done. We'd rather say that here than let you assume a timer we can't yet show you. ## Using it the way it's meant to be used Short list, and none of it will surprise you. Don't put someone else's child in here without the standing to do it. Don't upload anything illegal. Don't attack the service, scrape it, or try to reach an archive that isn't yours. We can suspend or close an account that does those things, and if we ever do, we'll tell you why in a sentence a person wrote. ## The prompts All 133 [questions and missions are published](/prompts.md), free to read and free to use personally. Take them to a notebook, a group chat, the dinner table — that's use, not misuse. If you want to republish the library somewhere else, ask first at hello@pocketchronicle.app. ## This site and its waitlist One a day, by email. A note when it opens and when the price goes live. Nothing else. That sentence sits under the form, and it's the whole agreement: sign up and that is what you get. You can unsubscribe in one click at any time, and [the privacy page](/privacy.md) covers exactly what happens to your address. ## The as-is part The app and this site are provided as-is, which is the plain-English version of a paragraph you've seen in capital letters elsewhere: we work to keep everything here accurate and working, and we don't guarantee it. We can't promise the service is never down, never loses a request, or never has a bug in it. **What we can promise is that we're not the only copy of your archive if you don't want us to be** — the export exists precisely so that a bad day of ours isn't a bad day of yours, and it's free, complete and always available. If something is wrong, broken, or out of date, tell us at [hello@pocketchronicle.app](mailto:hello@pocketchronicle.app) and a person will fix it. That is the warranty on offer — someone who wants to know. To the extent the law lets us say so, we're not liable for indirect or consequential losses, and what we owe you in any case is capped at what you've paid us in the last twelve months. That's the one paragraph here written for a lawyer rather than for you, and it's kept short on purpose. ## Changes, and how you'll know These terms can change — most often when something in the app changes and this page has to catch up. When they do, this page changes and the date below moves with it. **The date is the notice.** If a change is one that affects what you pay or what happens to your archive, you'll hear about it by email as well, before it takes effect. ## Getting hold of us [hello@pocketchronicle.app](mailto:hello@pocketchronicle.app), and a person reads it. Pocket Chronicle is built by one person in the United States, and these terms are governed by the law there. Last updated August 25, 2026.