About

A journal that can't be read over your shoulder.

Hearth is a private journal with an AI companion called Inkling. You write; Inkling remembers, reflects, and answers questions about your own life. The unusual part is that it does all of that without your words ever being readable on our servers.

Why it works this way

Most journalling apps ask you to trust a promise. We wanted the promise to be as small as possible, and the rest to be arithmetic. So privacy here is a ladder rather than a switch:

• Encrypted, always. Every entry is envelope-encrypted in your browser before it is stored — in every mode, on every plan. Plaintext at rest does not exist here.
• Burns after reading. When Inkling reflects on an entry, the words are seen for a heartbeat and then the glance burns away. Nothing stored, nothing logged, and nothing ever used to train anyone's AI.
• Private Vault turns a policy into a fact. Flip one free switch and our spare key is deleted. "We don't read it" becomes "we can't" — not because we improved, but because the key is gone.
• Delete means gone. Erase your account and every key goes with it, including our spare. Your words become unreadable forever, even in backups.

The distinction we won't blur

On the default setting we hold an escrow copy of your key, so that forgetting a passphrase is not the end of your journal. That means the honest sentence is we don't read it — a policy, enforced by us. Only in Private Vault mode is the sentence we can't read it — cryptography, enforced by mathematics.

Plenty of products say the second thing while meaning the first. We say which one applies, every time, on every screen where it matters. If you ever catch us blurring those two, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.

Who makes it

Hearth is a small shop. That is why these sentences are on a page rather than buried in a support article, why the accessibility statement lists the gaps we have not closed, and why the self-hosting page opens by telling you that you probably do not need it.

We host in the European Union. Payments are handled by Dodo Payments as Merchant of Record, so they are the seller on your receipt and we never see a card number. There is no advertising business here and no data to sell — the free plan is paid for by the people who upgrade, and that is the whole model.

Talk to us

Every address is on the contact page, and the help page answers the common questions without needing an account.