Gamed with Alex till midnight — gonna be wrecked tomorrow.
With Alex · Filed in “Ordinary Days”
01
On your phone by default
Text is stored on device with SwiftData; photos and recordings live in the app’s own sandbox. Everything works fully offline.
iPhone · Local-first · No account
At the end of
the day, a letter
arrives.
You wrote it. Every line you jotted down today, every photo you took, everything you finished — gathered into one letter, sealed with wax, and filed in a mailbox only you can open.
iOS 17.2 or later · Core features free forever · No ads, no tracking, no account
Letter no. 38
Tue, Sep 1, 2026
You wrote 2 entries today.
Took the bike around town after dinner. The air turned cool crossing the bridge. No headphones tonight, just the wheels and the sounds from the shops.
At Green Lake Park · #Fitness
You finished one thing —
✓ Split and repot the balcony mint
The day the cat came home is today.
Happiness is something we were born already knowing.
— Trace
Sealed at 3:35 PMDay 731 of keeping this together
Not a template. The letter is built from what you actually wrote today.
The letter
You don’t have to “keep a journal.”
Write a line. It does the rest.
Most journaling apps aren’t hard to use. They just assume you’ll sit down at the end of the day and write a whole entry. Trace doesn’t. Jot a line whenever something happens; at night it gathers the loose pieces into a letter, hands it to you, and you press once to seal it. Three years later, that original is still in the tray.
See how the letter is made, and where it goes
More than a journal
What happens in one day
shouldn’t live in five apps.
What you wrote, what you have to do, what you’re trying to keep up, the people on your mind, the dates you’re holding — in Trace they sit on one line. The Today page keeps them together, and at night they go into the letter together too.
JournalOne line counts
NotebooksFiled by volume, opens as paper
To-dosToday’s work sits inside today
GoalsFrom did-I to how-much
PeopleYour story with them
DatesLunar, countdowns, anniversaries
There’s also Looking Back, keepsakes, 24 themes, five Home Screen widgets, and optional period tracking that stays off until you turn it on.
You don’t write it down to manage your life.
You write it down so you’ll still recognise it later.
Privacy
We have no server
that could read your journal.
That isn’t a promise, it’s a fact of the architecture: Trace has no content server of its own. To read your writing there would have to be somewhere it lands. There isn’t.
02
Sync runs on your iCloud
Off by default. Turn it on and it uses your own private iCloud, handled end to end by Apple and stored in your account. The developer can neither read it nor keep it.
03
No analytics, no ads
No analytics SDK, no advertising, no crash reporting, no remote AI, no third-party tracking — and no account.
Health data that never lands here, export or erase whenever you like, and what each system permission is actually for. It’s all on the privacy page →
Pricing
The core is free, permanently.
Writing itself has no ceiling: unlimited entries, unlimited goals, unlimited people, to-dos, reminders, period tracking, 24 themes, 6 fonts, custom backgrounds, private iCloud sync and all five widgets cost nothing — and there are no ads.
Free
Always
Unlimited entries, goals and people. To-dos and reminders, 24 themes and 6 fonts, private iCloud sync, five Home Screen widgets, plus On This Day, the mood calendar, the photo wall and the footprint map.
Trace Pro
Monthly, yearly or lifetime
Seal today and build up your mailbox, export a PDF book, render a notebook as a page-turning video, Live Activities on the Lock Screen, 9 media per entry, unlimited notebooks and dates.
Trial
30 days for new users
Full Pro, simply given to you — no card up front. Nothing is charged when it ends; you drop back to free and nothing you’ve written goes anywhere.
