FAQ
The questions people actually ask.
Honest answers to what people email about before signing up. If something isn’t covered, write to [email protected] and we’ll add it.
About Yewmark
What is Yewmark?
Yewmark is an AI-assisted personal journaling web app. You open a page and write. Mood and energy are two taps you can do after you save, never before. The AI is a button you press when you want it — not a chatbot interrupting the page. The product is shaped around the idea that writing should feel unhurried, that no choice should sit between you and the cursor, and that your entries are yours.
Who made it?
A solo operator who got tired of journaling apps that turned the act of writing into a productivity surface — streaks, badges, daily prompts that decide what your day is about before you do. Yewmark is the journal we wanted to use ourselves. More on /about.
Is Yewmark open source?
Not currently. The decision is on the table for later, but isn't load-bearing right now. The privacy and data practices are documented in /privacy and /blog/what-we-dont-measure, and the data export / account-delete affordances are real and one-click, regardless of source visibility.
What happens if Yewmark shuts down?
You can export every entry at any time as JSON or Markdown from Settings — before, during, or after any change in service. The export is the full record of your writing, in a format you can open in any text editor or import elsewhere. We'd give 30 days' notice of any wind-down and keep export available throughout. That's the commitment.
Pricing
Is there a free plan?
Yes. The Lite plan is free, requires no credit card, and includes unlimited written entries, mood and energy tracking, three real AI requests per day, and full JSON + Markdown export. Paid plans exist because the AI bills have to get paid, but the free plan is genuinely usable, not a teaser.
How much do paid plans cost?
Steady is $3/month (30 AI requests/day, voice journaling, daily summaries). Deep is $10/month (100 requests/day, routed to a deeper model). Devoted is $25/month (effectively unlimited). All in USD. See /pricing for the current details.
Do you offer refunds?
Yes. Yewmark offers a 14-day no-questions full refund on paid subscriptions — not just EU/UK consumers, everyone. You can cancel any time from Settings; your plan stays active through the period you've already paid for, then drops back to the free Lite plan. The full policy is in the terms.
Do I need a credit card to try it?
No. The Lite plan is free and doesn't ask for a card. You can use Yewmark indefinitely without entering payment details. Upgrading is opt-in, never automatic.
What's the 30-day Steady bonus, exactly?
Every new account starts on the Steady tier for 30 days — voice journaling, longer chats, 30 AI requests a day — with no card on file. At day 30 the account naturally lands on Lite (the free tier, fully usable) unless you've subscribed by then. There's no surprise charge because there's no payment method on file to charge.
Why is the minimum $3/month, not $1?
Honest answer: Stripe's fixed fees take about $0.39 of every $3 charge, leaving us roughly $2.61. That has to cover the AI API calls (which scale with how much you use the chat and digest features), the server, the email infrastructure, the backups, and one person's time. At $1/month, a moderately-active user would put us underwater every month. The Lite tier (free, 3 AI requests/day, unlimited writing) is genuinely usable indefinitely — if $3 is hard right now, the right answer is Lite, not a deeper discount.
Privacy and data
Do you use my entries to train AI?
No. Your entries are never used for training — not by us, not by the AI providers we route through. Every model provider in our chain is on a business-API tier that contractually forbids training on API traffic. Your writing is data we serve back to you, not material for model improvement.
What analytics do you use?
None of the usual ones. No Google Analytics, no Plausible, no Mixpanel, no Hotjar, no session replay, no tracking pixels in emails. We do count aggregate page views per day per path (no user identifier, no IP, no cookie) so we can tell whether anyone is reading the site. The full list of what we do and don't collect is in /blog/what-we-dont-measure.
Where are my entries stored?
On a single VPS in Europe, in a PostgreSQL database we run ourselves. TLS 1.3 in transit; disk-level encryption at rest. Daily off-VPS backup. The infrastructure is documented in /blog/how-yewmark-is-built.
Can I export my entries?
Yes — from Settings, with one click, in either JSON or Markdown. Your entries, your mood and energy chips, your AI digests, all included. No formal request needed.
Can I delete my account?
Yes — from Settings, also one click. Deletion is soft for seven days (sign back in within that window and the account restores). After seven days, the data is purged hard. If you have a paid subscription, it's flipped to cancel-at-period-end the moment you click delete, so you're not billed for a renewal that lands inside the grace window.
Are my entries end-to-end encrypted?
No. Entries are server-readable so the AI features can work on them. TLS in transit, disk-level encryption at rest, but not E2EE. If end-to-end encryption is non-negotiable for you, Yewmark isn't the right fit — Journey offers it on their paid tier. As a middle ground, you can mark any individual entry as private from the Saved view, and that entry is never sent to a model for any AI feature.
What happens if I delete an entry?
It goes to a recycle bin for 7 days. During that window you can restore it from Settings → Recycle bin. After 7 days, it's hard-deleted from the database. There's no "permanently delete now" button on purpose — the 7-day grace is the policy, so a panic-delete is always recoverable.
Features
What does the AI actually do?
Four things, all opt-in. (1) Per-entry digest: when you save an entry, the AI offers up to three takes on it — Witness names what's underneath, Mirror points at a pattern across your earlier pages (only when there's a real one to point to), Reframe surfaces an interpretive leap and offers a kinder reading. All takes render together; you don't pick between them. Each one can be pulled on with an inline “Ask about this take” affordance that opens a focused conversation with the AI about that piece of your writing — the conversation persists alongside the entry. (2) Talk it over: a separate conversational surface for back-and-forth from any saved entry. (3) Optional daily summary: a quiet weekday email about the entries you wrote. (4) Optional weekly thread: a Sunday email about the week. None of it runs unless you opt in. See the changelog for how the voice has evolved.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes. The site is responsive and runs in any mobile browser. You can also install it as a PWA (Progressive Web App) on iOS, Android, or desktop — from Safari, Share → Add to Home Screen; from Chrome on Android, the install prompt appears automatically. There's no native app yet and there may never be; the web experience is the product.
Does it sync between devices?
Yes, automatically. Sign in on any device and your entries are there. No setup, no sync settings, no cloud account to configure separately.
Can I journal by voice?
Yes, on the Steady plan and up. Tap the microphone, speak, and a transcription comes back as text you can edit. Voice isn't on the Lite plan because transcription is paid usage and the free tier needs a sane bound.
Why no streaks?
We left streaks out on purpose. A streak counter turns journaling into a performance metric — the kind of system that punishes you for stopping for a week, then makes you feel like the page is for proving things rather than thinking. Some people find streaks motivating; for those people, Day One or Journey are honest options. We tuned for the other case. More on why.
Can I turn the AI off?
Yes — in two ways. Globally: pick the “AI off” option in Settings → Voice and the digest, chat, and summary features stop running for your account. Per entry: toggle the private flag on any individual entry from the Saved view, and that entry is never sent to a model for any AI feature (digest, chat, weekly summaries, insights, people extraction). The flag is enforced at the database query level, not just in the UI.
Comparisons
How is Yewmark different from Day One, Penzu, Journey, Dayora, Reflectly, Rosebud, or Stoic?
Each of those is established, polished, and the right pick for some people. We wrote honest comparison pages for the most common ones: vs Day One, vs Penzu, vs Journey, vs Dayora, vs Reflectly, vs Rosebud, vs Stoic — each one tells you when the other app fits better, not when ours does.
Is this just Notion or Obsidian with AI?
No. Notion and Obsidian are knowledge-base tools that happen to support journaling. Yewmark is the opposite of that — a journal that happens to support a few features. Notion's strength is structure (databases, templates, dashboards). Yewmark's strength is the absence of structure: an empty page that gets out of the way.
Still wondering?
Either write a sentence and see if it fits, or send a question.