A place to keep your life, not perform it.
Weeks go by and you can't say what was in them. That's the thing we set out to fix. But most apps built to help you look back are really there to keep you coming back: streaks to guilt you into returning, scores to rank your days, and a lot of them quietly sending your most private thoughts off to servers you'll never see. We've worked in software long enough to see exactly how these tricks work, and the more we noticed, the harder it got to unsee. So we built the opposite.
The three forces we're fighting
Guilt-by-design
Think about streaks, missed-day warnings, those little "we miss you" nudges. None of it is an accident. It's all carefully designed to make skipping a single day feel like failure, and that's backwards. Real reflection doesn't punish you for taking a Thursday off.
Surveillance capitalism
Here's the uncomfortable part: pour your most private thoughts into a product that has no other way of making money, and you become the thing being sold. Your vulnerabilities, your patterns, the state you're in on a hard day, all of it quietly becomes training data or ad targeting. We couldn't bring ourselves to build something that works like that, so Wonaby is paid for by the people using it and nobody else.
False self-knowledge
A productivity score isn't self-knowledge, and a mood emoji averaged across your week isn't really insight either. The kind of understanding that actually changes something comes from noticing your own patterns, the ones you recognize the moment you see them, not the ones an algorithm decides to hand you.
Our beliefs
Your thoughts belong to you, full stop. Everything you write is end-to-end encrypted before it ever leaves your device, which means we can't read it and neither can anyone on our team. We hold your account email and the shape of your categories, so sign-in and sync can work. We never hold a readable word of what you wrote, so even if someone forced us to hand over what we have, your journal would still be sealed.
We don't collect your writing, study your patterns, or sell your attention to anyone. There's no ad business behind the scenes, no engagement targets we're chasing, and no investors leaning on us to "leverage" your private moments. Honestly, the whole model is about as simple as it gets: you pay for the app, and we get to keep building it.
Write whenever you feel like it, or don't write for a month. Nothing breaks. There are no streaks to protect, no scores to keep up, and no passive-aggressive notification wondering where you've been. A journal that has to guilt you into opening it has confused being used with being useful.
And the AI that's supposed to understand you shouldn't be sitting in a data center thousands of miles away. Your patterns, your words and the context behind them are read on your phone, not in some pipeline quietly training tomorrow's model. Nothing you write leaves your phone readable.
What this looks like in the app
Beliefs are cheap. Here is where each one shows up in something you can go and check.
No streaks, anywhere
There is no counter in Wonaby and no setting that adds one. The calendar shows a quiet dot on each day you saved something and nothing on the days you didn't, with no colours ranking you. A reminder only exists if you set one, it asks for permission first, and one switch turns it off.
Paid for by the people using it
The free plan is free for as long as you like, Pro is a subscription, and there is no third option: no ads, no data sales, nothing trained on what you write. Export is on every plan, and Wonaby deletes its copy the moment you've saved yours. What's free and what Pro costs is written out line by line.
The AI stays on your phone
Finding your patterns is deterministic maths with no language model involved. A small model on your phone only phrases the retrospectives and answers your questions, and it never assigns you a feeling you didn't choose. How a moment becomes a recap walks through it step by step.
We wanted somewhere to put the ordinary days and get them back later, without being scored for it and without anyone else reading along. Nobody had built it, so eventually we stopped waiting and built it ourselves.
If this resonates, we'd love to have you with us