The core journal is free, forever.

Software pricing is usually where the honesty runs out. So here is exactly how Ember works, with nothing hidden and nothing buried in a footnote.

What is free, forever

The core of Ember is free, and it never expires. This is not a trial or a teaser that quietly locks after thirty days. It is the whole journal.

• Unlimited everything. Journal entries, people, stories, and worlds, with no caps.
• The Graph. The living map of your people, free.
• The Feed and its quiet nudges. Free.
• Your data, out the door any time. Full export to an open JSON archive, and free import from Day One and Apple Journal.

You can write in Ember for a decade, never pay a cent, and keep everything. Your life archive is not held behind a paywall, and it never will be.

What Ember Plus adds

Ember Plus is optional. It adds two things, and only two:

• Private iCloud sync across your devices, through your own Apple account and your own keys, never mine.
• The full theme catalogue, so the app can look exactly the way you want it to.

That is the entire difference. Nothing about your writing, your people, or your ability to keep and export your data depends on Plus.

Yes, Plus is a subscription. Here is why.

Plus is available monthly or yearly, with a lifetime option for early users. You can see the current pricing on the home page. It is fair to ask why sync should cost anything at all, since it runs on your own iCloud and costs me nothing in servers. The honest answer is that you are not paying for infrastructure. You are helping keep a one-person project alive.

Ember is made by one person, with no investors and no ads. There is no growth team, and no engagement metrics to chase. Plus is what funds the slow, careful, ongoing work of building an app meant to last for decades. If supporting that is something you want to do, Plus is how. If it is not, the journal is yours to keep, for free, regardless.

No ads, no data mining, no catch

Because there are no investors to answer to, there is no pressure to monetize your attention or your writing. Ember shows no ads, sells nothing about you, and cannot read your entries. The whole business model fits in one sentence: a free core, an optional upgrade, and no one in the middle.