Your private, personal life archive.

A diary is for what happened today. An archive is for the story of your life. The difference is not the writing, it is the horizon. A diary asks only whether you can find yesterday. An archive asks whether your grandchildren could read it, whether it will survive a company you have never heard of going out of business, whether the words you are writing now will still open in thirty years.

Ember is built to be that archive. It is designed to hold decades of memories, photos, and relationships on your own Mac, and to still be yours long after most of today's apps have disappeared.

Built to outlast the software it runs on

Most journaling services quietly assume they will be around forever. History suggests otherwise. Apps get acquired, sunset, pivot, or vanish, and too often they take your writing with them, or lock it inside a format only they can read. An archive has to survive its own tools.

• Open formats, always readable. Ember stores your entire archive as plain, open JSON. Even if Ember itself were gone tomorrow, your words and their structure would still be there in files you can open.
• No lock-in, no hostages. Exporting your full archive is free and always available. Your history is never held for ransom behind a paywall or a proprietary format.
• It comes to you. Ember imports from Day One and Apple Journal for free, so the years you have already written can join the archive instead of being stranded in an app you have left behind.

Kept on your machine, not on a stranger's server

An archive of your entire life is not something to entrust to a company's cloud. Ember is local-first and native to macOS, built in Swift, with no account and no server, and it works fully offline. Everything lives on your device.

• Private by construction. Ember has no AI, ever. It never reads, writes, or summarizes a word of your archive, and your entry content is strictly blocked from leaving your machine.
• Sync only if you want it. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you turn on sync, and even then it travels only through your own iCloud, never through anyone else's servers.
• Locked to you alone. A biometric lock keeps decades of private history behind your own face or fingerprint.

Decades, kept in order

An archive is only useful if you can navigate it, and a life that spans decades needs more than a single scroll. Ember gives your history structure without ever rewriting it for you.

• People are permanent. Type @ to mention someone and the entry is linked to them forever. Years later you can open a person and read their entire presence across your life on one page.
• Stories hold the long threads. Group entries written across many years into a single narrative. You decide what belongs together, and Ember never auto-connects anything on its own.
• Worlds keep the eras and contexts distinct, color-coding the different parts of a long life so a decade of writing never becomes an undifferentiated pile.

Free to keep, forever

An archive you have to keep paying rent on is not really yours. The core of Ember is free forever and never expires, so your life's record is never one missed payment away from being locked. Ember Plus is an optional upgrade that adds private iCloud sync across devices and the full theme catalogue. It stays beautiful, accessible, and intimately yours.