Thursday, 3 September
Write the day,
then
close
it.
A private journaling app that opens in your browser, already on today's page.
Free on one device. No account, no sign-up, nothing to agree to.
Your journal is where you left it. This page is just the site.
What went well today, and why?
Cleared the desk before starting. It helped more than it should have.
start the day
Market at seven. Back before the street woke up.
Reread a page from March. I had forgotten writing it.
Quiet one. Nothing worth keeping, kept anyway.
Write before this hour and it goes under yesterday.
After this, a day can be read but not rewritten.
On Lifetime, one file in your own Drive, Daybook/daybook.json, with no server in between.
The day, already open
It opens on today
Most journal apps make writing feel like homework. Daybook opens on today with the cursor already blinking. No menu to cross, no title to invent, and no blank canvas asking what you would like to make.
The day is the title
The cursor is already in today's page. Nothing to name, no folder to pick, no New Entry button to press.
One day, one page
Write at nine in the morning and again at eleven at night. Both sittings land on the same dated page, each stamped with its own time.
Your day ends when you say
Still typing at one in the morning? That belongs to yesterday, and Daybook files it there. You pick the hour the day turns over, anywhere from midnight to six.
The day closes
After the window you choose, a day can be read but not rewritten. What you add much later tends to be shaped by how things turned out.
No streaks, no reminders, no badges
Nothing counts the days you missed. Nothing arrives in the evening asking you to reflect. Miss a month and nothing is broken.
It writes with no signal
Install it to your home screen and it writes on a plane, in a tunnel, off the grid entirely. Nothing it needs is on a network.
Where it lives
Your journal is one plain file, in your own Google Drive with Lifetime
Your whole journal is one file, daybook.json. On Daybook Local it stays on the device you wrote it on. Add Daybook Lifetime and the same file lives in your own Google Drive. We do not have a server. We do not have your password. We cannot read a word of it.
You can open that file in any text editor. Export the whole archive to this device whenever you like, and import only ever adds days back, so it does not overwrite anything newer. If Daybook disappeared tomorrow, your history would still be sitting in your own storage.
There when you want it
A prompt, if you ask for one
Press / on a blank page or on any empty line, or Ctrl K anywhere at all. Nothing suggests itself while you are mid-sentence, and you can turn prompts off for good.
start the day
Long call with Mum about the garden. She has decided the fig tree stays.
Finished the blue notebook. Two years, and the last page was a shopping list.
Slept badly, worked well. Not sure those two are unrelated.
All of it, in one column
Every day you wrote, newest first
The Timeline is the whole journal in one column, with search across every word of it. On This Day brings back the same date from the years before, and any day opens one at random when you have neither a date nor a word. No calendar grid to fill in, no heat map keeping score.
Paper is the palette Daybook ships with, and there are four others. You can flatten the page or turn the background wash off, and your writing stays the same plain, readable size whichever you pick.
Bought once, not rented
Two ways to keep it
A journal is the one thing you should not have to keep renting. Most journalling apps are a subscription, billed every year for as long as you want to go on reading what you wrote. Daybook is free on one device, and $29 once for every device you own.
The whole app, on one device.
- Every day you want to write, with no limit
- Timeline, search, On This Day and any day
- Prompts, five palettes and a plainer surface
- Export and import your whole archive by hand
- Writes with no signal, installs to your home screen
- Sync across your devices
- Backup to your Drive
The same journal, on every device you own.
- Everything in Local
- Google Drive sync across phone, tablet and laptop, each sitting labelled with the device it came from
- Automatic backup to your own Drive account
- One payment, kept for life
- Still no account, still no server, still no subscription
- Your file stays readable in any text editor
Thirty days to change your mind, refunded in full, no reason asked. Refunds.
Before you write anything
Questions people ask
Answered in the page rather than in a support thread, and every one of them describes what Daybook does today rather than what it is meant to do later.
Is Daybook actually private?
Yes. Daybook has no accounts, no analytics, no tracking and no advertising. What you write stays on your own device, and on Daybook Lifetime a copy goes to your own Google Drive. There is one server function, and it exists only so that a Google sign-in can be completed; it never receives a word of your journal.
Where is my journal stored?
In one plain file called daybook.json. On Daybook Local it stays in the storage of the device you wrote it on. On Daybook Lifetime the same file lives in your own Google Drive, under the narrowest access Google offers, which lets Daybook see only the file it created and nothing else you keep there.
Does it work offline?
Yes. Install Daybook to your home screen and it writes on a plane, in a tunnel, or with the signal off entirely: nothing it needs to open today's page is on a network. With Lifetime, the file goes to your Drive the next time you are online.
Do I need an account?
No. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to agree to before writing. You sign in to Google only if you want the same journal on more than one device, and that sign-in is to your own Drive rather than to us.
Is there a subscription?
No. Daybook Local is free on one device, with no time limit. Daybook Lifetime is $29 once, for every device you own, kept for life. If it is not for you, thirty days to change your mind and a full refund, no reason asked.
How is it different from Day One or Journey?
Those are subscriptions, and they are broad: photos, media, moods, reflections written by a machine. Daybook is bought once and is deliberately narrow. One dated page a day, no streaks and no reminders, and a journal that is a file you keep rather than a row in somebody's database. On a feature list they win. That is the trade, and it is set out row by row on the Day One alternative page.
What happens if Daybook disappears?
Your journal outlives it. The file is plain text you can open in any editor, and Daybook will write your whole archive out to a file at any time, with no conditions attached. Nothing you wrote is held hostage to this app continuing to exist.
Which devices does it run on?
Any device with a current browser: iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux. It installs to the home screen and opens like an app. With Daybook Lifetime the same journal is on all of them, and each sitting is labelled with the device it was written on.
Today is already open.
No account neededOpen today's pageFree on one device, forever. Already writing somewhere else? Bring your journal here.