Questions & answers

Yes. Memory Jar is free to use with no account, and works entirely offline: create jars, add written notes and photos, seal them into keepsakes, and export a PDF, all on your device.

What the free plan doesn’t include is cloud backup, keepsake sharing, and voice memories. See “Why upgrade to the paid plan?” just below for what those add and why they’re worth it.

These are memories you’d be heartbroken to lose, and the paid plan is the way to truly protect them:

• Peace of mind. Automatic, encrypted cloud backup means a lost, broken, or stolen phone never means lost memories.
• Move phones easily. Sign in on a new device and your jars come back.
• Share keepsakes. Send a sealed jar to family as a private, encrypted link.
• Voice memories. Record and keep voice notes, so a jar can hold someone’s actual voice.
• Private by design. Upgrading costs you nothing in privacy: backups and shares are end-to-end encrypted, so even we can’t read them (see the privacy answers below).
• Keeps Memory Jar going. It’s built by a tiny independent maker, with no ads and no selling your data; subscriptions are what keep it alive and improving.

If your jars hold things you’d hate to lose, the paid plan is the recommended choice.

Written notes, photos, and voice notes. Add them as memories over time, then seal the jar to turn what you’ve collected into a keepsake you can revisit, export, or share.

Sealing fixes the memories you’ve collected into a keepsake. You can open it any time, and optionally lock a jar until a future date or set it to be delivered later, for example as something handed down.

Memory Jar is local-first: your jars live on your device and nothing leaves it unless you turn on cloud backup or share a keepsake.

On the device, your memories are kept in a database that’s fully encrypted at rest (SQLCipher), and decrypted copies of photos and audio are treated as temporary and cleared. You can also require fingerprint or face unlock to open the app (Settings → Require biometric unlock).

No, we can’t read it. Your backup is end-to-end encrypted before it leaves your phone.

When you set up cloud backup we generate a random 256-bit key that encrypts your data, and that key is itself locked with your passphrase (stretched with PBKDF2-SHA256 at 310,000 iterations, the OWASP recommendation) plus a one-time recovery code. The unlocked key never leaves your device. Our servers only ever hold scrambled data and a locked copy of the key, so no one, not us, not a cloud provider, can read your memories.

The trade-off: keep your passphrase and recovery code safe. Because we genuinely can’t see your data, we can’t reset them for you.

Yes. A shared jar lets several people fill one jar together while it’s still open. Invite them by a private link or by email, and everyone adds their own notes, photos and voice from their own phone. It’s made for a wedding, a group gift, or a jar the whole family keeps for a new baby.

You start the jar and stay in control: you can stop new contributions whenever you like, then seal it into a keepsake like any other jar. Starting a shared jar needs a cloud plan, but joining one is free for everyone you invite.

Yes. When you share a sealed jar, it’s encrypted with AES-256 and the decryption key is placed in the share link itself, in the part after the “#”, which browsers never send to a server. The keepsake is decrypted in the recipient’s browser.

That means only someone with the exact link can open it, and even we can’t read a keepsake you’ve shared. Treat the link like a key: share it only with people you trust, and you can stop sharing to revoke access.

Never. There are no ads, no third-party trackers, and we don’t sell or share your data. Memory Jar is funded by its subscriptions and purchases, not by your information.

It gathers your written notes and photos into a single keepsake PDF. Voice notes can’t be saved into a PDF, so only voice notes with a written comment are included (showing that comment); the audio itself isn’t exported.

Not yet. Reliable transcription on the device isn’t available, so voice notes are saved as audio you can play back. If you’d like text to appear in an exported keepsake, add a written comment to the voice note.

If cloud backup is on, sign in on the new phone to restore them. Without cloud backup, save a backup file from Settings → Back up / Restore and keep it somewhere safe, then restore from it on the new device.

Nothing in your jar is deleted. It stays on your phone exactly as it was, and any existing cloud backup stays in place too, so you can still read and restore it. What stops is creating anything new that needs an active subscription: new cloud backups, new hosted shares, new voice notes. Resubscribe and those start working again.

Both. Turn off sharing for that keepsake and the link stops working straight away. Hosted shares also expire on their own after a period, so a link you shared and forgot about doesn't sit there working forever.

No. You can create a jar, add notes and photos, and seal it into a keepsake without an account and without connecting to a server. An account and a connection only matter once you turn on cloud backup or sharing, which are part of the paid plan.

Not right now. Memory Jar is built for Android. It uses Android-specific security, including the Android Keystore, to protect data on the device. There's no iOS or iPhone version at this stage.