The life archive app for Mac.

A life archive is a private, lasting record of your life, organized around the people and stories that made it rather than the dates things happened on. That is a philosophy, and you could keep one in a notebook or a pile of text files. Ember is the app built to keep one for you, on the Mac, with almost none of the work. Here is how it actually does it, feature by feature.

The journal is the input

You do not manage a database in Ember. You write, the way you would in any journal. Plain text, markdown, a photo if you want one. That daily writing is the raw material, and everything else is about what happens to those words after you write them. Instead of dropping into a chronological pile, they gather around the people and the threads they belong to.

People come first

Type @ and a name, and that entry belongs to that person forever. There is no contact form to fill in and no CRM to maintain. Open someone's page months or years later and every moment you ever wrote about them is waiting there, in order, in your own words. This is the heart of the archive: a life is mostly its people, so the record is built around them, not around the calendar.

Worlds keep your life in context

People and entries live in Worlds: Work, Family, College, the friend from a train platform in 2022. Each World is color-coded, so the different parts of a life stay distinct instead of blurring into one endless feed. Worlds are how an archive stays legible at the scale of decades.

Stories are the threads that span years

A single day is rarely the unit that matters. A friendship, a climbing season, a hard year, a move across the country: these are Stories, and you weave entries into them yourself. Ember never connects anything on its own. It keeps exactly the narrative you build, so looking back means following a thread instead of scrolling a timeline.

The Graph is your life as a living map

Every person and world you write about slowly forms a map. The Graph is a force-directed picture of your people and how they connect, the closest thing there is to seeing the shape of a life at a glance. It is not a productivity dashboard. It is a portrait that fills in as you live.

The Feed keeps the archive alive

An archive you only add to is just storage. The Feed is what makes Ember a living one. It brings back moments from years past, and when someone you are tending has gone quiet for a while, they surface here beside your own last words about them. There is no AI, no suggested message, no generated anything. Just a reminder, made of what you wrote, that nudges you toward a person rather than toward the app.

It is yours, in the open, forever

An archive is only worth keeping if it will outlast the app. Ember is local-first: there is no account and no Ember server, everything lives on your own device, and it works fully offline. If you turn on sync, it runs through your own iCloud, your Apple account and your keys, never ours. Your whole archive is stored as open, documented JSON, so you can read it, search it with ordinary tools, back it up by copying a folder, and take it anywhere. Moving in is easy too, with free imports from Day One and Apple Journal.

No AI reads your life. But you can, with any AI you like.

Ember never uses AI to read, summarize, or rewrite your entries. The words in your archive are yours, and they stay that way. That is not anti-technology, it is pro-consent: because Ember exports everything as clean JSON with no lock-in, you can take your own archive and feed it to ChatGPT, Claude, or any tool you trust, whenever you want, entirely on your own terms. Ember just refuses to do it to you by default.

A life archive with no setup

You could assemble a version of this yourself in a knowledge tool, wiring up people, dates, and links by hand. If you are weighing that, see life archive vs second brain and how to build a life archive. Ember has made those decisions for you. The core journal is free forever and never expires. Ember Plus is an optional upgrade for private iCloud sync across your devices and the full theme catalogue, which quietly keeps this one-person project alive. Either way, the archive is yours.