A local-first journal and life archive.

We've grown far too used to web apps that can vanish overnight and take our data with them. A company gets acquired, a service shuts down, a server goes dark, and years of writing are suddenly gone or held for ransom. I designed Ember to be local-first so that this can never happen to your memories. Your journal belongs on your hard drive, not rented in someone else's cloud.

Your data, in open JSON, on your own drive

Everything you write in Ember is stored as a standard, open JSON archive, right on your device. This is not a proprietary vault only Ember can read. It is plain, documented, portable data that you own outright.

• You can read it yourself. Open the files in any text editor. Your words are your words, in a format that needs no special app to understand.
• Export is free and documented. Getting your whole journal out costs nothing, and the format is written up at our docs so you always know exactly what you have.
• No lock-in, ever. Ember imports from Day One and Apple Journal for free, and it lets you leave just as easily. A tool you can walk away from is a tool you can actually trust.

It outlasts the app, the company, and the servers

Here is the promise underneath local-first: your archive does not depend on me. If Ember stopped being updated, if my little company disappeared, if every server on earth went offline, your journal would still be sitting on your drive, complete and readable. Open formats outlive the software that wrote them. That is the entire idea.

You aren't trusting me with your data. You're just using the tool I crafted to tend to it. The difference sounds small and is actually everything, because it means the safety of your memories is in your hands, not mine.

Local means genuinely fast

Local-first is not only about ownership. It's also why Ember feels so quick. There is no API to wait on, no round trip to a server just to load your own words. When you open a Story spanning years, it appears at once. When you search, the results are instant, because everything is already right there on your machine.

Ember is a native Mac app built in Swift, so it draws on the full power of your own hardware instead of a distant data center. No loading spinners, no lag between a keystroke and the page. The speed is a direct consequence of the architecture: your data is close, so the app is fast.

A life archive, all yours

Because your data lives locally and connects freely, Ember is more than a diary. It is a life archive. Type @ to mention a person and that entry is linked to them forever. Organize your life into color-coded Worlds, gather memories into Stories that span years, and see everyone you care about as a living, force-directed graph. When someone you're tending goes quiet, they resurface beside your own last words to them, with no AI and no generated messages, just a gentle reminder in your own hand.

All of that richness, and every byte of it stays on your drive in a format you own. Building it this way as a solo developer was deeply intentional. It respects your ownership, it keeps your archive safe in your own hands, and it means the people and moments you tend to are yours to keep for as long as you like.