Questions,
answered.

Yes. Every new account gets a 14-day free trial with full access to everything — writing, attachments, voice notes, insights and export. No payment details are requested at any point during the trial.

Create an account with your name, an email address and a password of at least 12 characters, then accept the terms. Your journal opens immediately with three starter notebooks and today’s prompt waiting.

Anything. Most people start with the daily prompt, a mood check-in, or a single line about how the day went. A sentence is a complete entry.

Yes. Just One Thought works in any modern browser, and you can add it to your home screen so it opens full-screen like an app. Layouts are designed for small screens first.

No. There is no app store download and no desktop installer. Adding it to your home screen is optional and takes one tap.

Only you, through your signed-in account. Entry titles, body text, attachment names and uploaded files are encrypted at rest. There are no public profiles, no feeds, and no third-party analytics on the site.

No — and we say so plainly rather than implying otherwise. It uses server-side authenticated encryption (XChaCha20-Poly1305 with a server-held key), which protects stored content at rest. An authorised operator with the application key can technically decrypt it. HTTPS protects data in transit.

The PIN is an optional second lock, useful on a shared laptop or tablet. It is required after login and whenever you choose to lock the journal. It protects against someone who finds an unlocked browser — it is not a replacement for your account password.

Dates, notebook labels and colours, mood scores, word counts, file MIME types and sizes, and account/subscription metadata remain database plaintext so the app can filter and chart them. The entry text itself is encrypted.

By default 30 minutes of inactivity and 12 hours absolute. Changing your password or PIN signs out your other sessions immediately.

A single necessary HttpOnly session cookie keeps you signed in. There are no advertising cookies, no analytics scripts, and no external fonts or CDNs — the page loads only from this domain.

Only someone with your offline passphrase. Drafts are encrypted in your browser with AES-256-GCM using a key derived from that passphrase (PBKDF2-SHA256, 310,000 iterations). The key is held in memory only and never written to storage.

Yes. You can attach JPG, PNG and WebP images, upload audio files, or record a voice note directly in the browser where MediaRecorder is supported. Each entry holds up to ten files of up to 10 MB each.

No silent online autosave — you press Save reflection when you mean it, so a half-finished thought is never published to your journal. There is an explicit encrypted offline draft button if you want to keep something locally.

Search covers the page of entries you have loaded rather than a plaintext global index. This is a deliberate privacy trade-off: your private text is never indexed in plaintext on the server. Filters by notebook, mood and date range cover the rest.

You can save encrypted drafts on your device while offline — up to ten, protected by a separate passphrase you choose — then open them and save to your journal when you reconnect. Your saved journal and attachments are never cached by the service worker.

Yes: bold, italic, underline, headings, bullet and numbered lists, and quotes. Pasting from elsewhere strips formatting to plain text so nothing unwanted can execute in the editor.

There is no practical limit at normal use. A single entry is capped at 200 KB of formatted text, which is far more than a very long essay.

Your journal becomes read-only unless a subscription is activated. You can still read every entry, view your calendar and insights, and export your whole journal to PDF. New writing simply pauses.

$5 per month, or $40 per year — which saves $20 against paying monthly. Both include every feature; there is no separate tier for privacy or export.

Yes, from Account → your plan, at any time. Cancelling switches your account to read-only immediately. Your content is never deleted automatically because a plan ended.

Not yet. The checkout screen in this release is a clearly labelled demonstration: it does not charge you, does not request real card details, and does not activate a paid plan. A verified payment partner is being arranged; contact support for a manual arrangement in the meantime.

No. Access becomes read-only and everything remains readable and exportable. Deletion only ever happens if you explicitly delete an entry, or request account deletion from support.

There is no live charging in this build, so there is nothing to refund yet. Once live payments exist, the refund terms will be published in the Terms of service before any charge is possible.

Yes. Export your whole journal through the print view at any time — including when your plan has ended. In the print dialog choose “Save as PDF”. Attachments are listed by filename rather than embedded.

Yes. Contact support from the email address on the account and request deletion. Because entries are encrypted per user, deletion is thorough and cannot be undone.

Use the forgot-password link to receive a reset message. Delivery depends on the hosting mail configuration; if it does not arrive, contact support and a human will verify you.

Sign in on a trusted session and change it from Account, or contact support for identity-verified recovery.

It cannot be recovered — that is what makes it private. The encrypted drafts remain on your device, unreadable. If a draft matters, keep the passphrase somewhere safe.

Your journal stays for as long as your account exists. Deleting an entry removes its encrypted content and attachments immediately. Account deletion removes everything on request. Backup retention is documented in the privacy policy and managed by the operator.

No. The streak counts today or yesterday, so missing one evening doesn’t erase a good month. There is no shaming state anywhere in the app.

Open the prompts library and answer the first question that doesn’t irritate you. A two-word answer is a valid start.

Separating the parts of your life: gratitude, work, travel, hard days. Removing a notebook never deletes its entries — they simply return to All entries, unfiled.

No. Mood tracking, prompts and insights are personal reflection tools, not medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you are struggling, please speak to a qualified professional or a local crisis service.