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. Their streaks nag you into returning, their scores rank your days, and a lot of them quietly send your most private thoughts to servers you'll never see. We've worked in software long enough to see how these tricks work. So we built Wonaby without the guilt, the scores or the cloud.
The three forces we're fighting
Guilt-by-design
Think about streak warnings, missed-day reminders, 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 insight either. What's worth having is your own life shown back to you. The patterns are counted from what you actually recorded, and each one links to the moments behind it, so you can check it for yourself.
Our beliefs
Your thoughts belong to you, full stop. Your journal 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. So sign-in and sync can work, we do see your account email, which tags each moment holds, a short label made from the name of each tag you add, and details such as when you wrote. We also see each photo's dimensions and a tiny blurred placeholder of it. We never hold a readable word of your moments or a clear copy of your photos, so even if someone forced us to hand over what we have, what you wrote would still be sealed.
We can't read your writing, we don't sell your attention to anyone, and nothing you write trains a model. 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 scores to keep up, nothing nags you to protect a streak, and no passive-aggressive notification wonders 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 reads your journal 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.
Nothing breaks when you miss a day
Nothing nags you to keep a streak going, and Zen mode hides the streaks with one switch. 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 reaches you only after you give permission, which Wonaby asks for when you turn one on, and you can turn it off any time.
Paid for by the people using it
The free plan has no time limit, 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, with Pro, answers your questions in Ask Wonaby. 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. We couldn't find it, so we stopped waiting and built it ourselves.
If this resonates, we'd love to have you with us