legal

privacy policy

last updated: september 2026 · human made things

1. what is stored, and where

your entries are written to your iPhone’s own storage using Apple’s SwiftData framework. they stay there. we cannot read them and we never receive copies.

you do not need an account. there is an optional Sign in with Apple in settings, and an optional first name during setup. if you use either, that name — plus the email address Apple hands the app, and a gender if you chose to give one — is saved on your device alongside the rest of your profile. it is never sent to us. you can delete all of it at any time in settings.

your settings — timer length, font, which features you have turned on — are stored the same way, on the device.

if you have iCloud device backups enabled, your entries may be included in that backup. that is Apple’s backup of your phone, governed by Apple’s privacy policy, and we have no access to it.

2. what we never collect

your writing. not an entry, not a title, not a quote, not the note you leave yourself at a check-in — with the single exception in section 4, where you ask for a reading and the entry travels to DeepSeek to answer it. nothing else sends it anywhere, ever.

we never receive your name, your email address, your phone number or your contacts, and the app never asks iOS where you are — the approximate place worked out from your network address is described in section 5, and it is the only location anything here has. we do not use Apple’s advertising identifier and never ask for it, which is why freewrite shows no tracking prompt. we do not track you across other apps or websites, and we do not sell or share anything with anyone for advertising. freewrite runs no crash-reporting service of its own.

what we do collect is usage analytics, set out in full in section 5. it can say which features were used. it cannot say what you wrote.

3. subscriptions — RevenueCat

freewrite is free to use, with an optional paid subscription. purchases are handled by Apple, and we use RevenueCat to check whether a subscription is active.

RevenueCat receives your App Store purchase receipt, basic device metadata (device model, OS version, locale, country), and a random anonymous identifier it generates itself. it never receives your name, your email address, your Apple ID, or a single word of your writing. RevenueCat acts as our data processor under a data processing agreement, and is based in the USA.

their policy: revenuecat.com/privacy

4. AI — some on your phone, one thing not

freewrite can read your writing back to you: a reading of the entry you just wrote, a title for it, and recurring themes across many nights.

the themes are worked out entirely on your phone, using Apple’s on-device models, and never leave it. titles and summaries use that same on-device model when your iPhone can run it, and DeepSeek when it cannot.

the reading in the writing panel always goes to DeepSeek — on every iPhone, including ones that could run Apple’s model, because the on-device model cannot stream a reply as it is being written. this is the main way your writing leaves your device, so here is exactly what travels with it:

• the entry you just wrote
• the first name and gender held in your profile, if you gave either, so the reply reads as though it is addressed to you
• the mood and the focus from your check-in, if you did one that night
• short summaries of up to fifteen of your previous entries, so the reply knows what you have been writing about lately

the other two are smaller. a title for an entry sends the entry text and nothing else. the recurring-themes reading sends neither your entries nor your profile — only counts, and the names of the themes your phone already worked out on its own.

none of them send your email address, an account, or a device identifier. DeepSeek is the only outside service that ever receives your writing or your profile. if you would rather none of that left your phone, do not ask for a reading — the themes, the tree and everything else keep working without it.

their policy: deepseek.com/privacy

5. usage analytics — PostHog

from version 2.0, freewrite records how the app is used: which features people reach for, which they ignore, and where they abandon something half-finished. we use PostHog for this, on its European servers.

it never sees your writing. not your entries, not their titles, not the quotes you make, not what you tell the AI or what it tells you back. that is not a promise we keep by being careful at each step — the analytics code has no way to carry free-form text at all, so a stray sentence of yours cannot end up in it by mistake. there is no screen or session recording of any kind, including during onboarding, where you write for real.

what it does record is that something happened: a session started, a check-in was completed, a quote was captured, a reminder was switched on. numbers are blunted before they leave your phone — a word count becomes “brief” or “long”, never the figure itself. alongside those it carries your settings — the theme, the font, whether the reminder is on, roughly how many nights you have written — so we can tell which options are worth keeping and which are clutter.

you are not named and not identified. events carry a random identifier the app makes on first launch and keeps on your device. it is not Apple’s advertising identifier, it is not your Apple ID, it cannot be matched to you or to anything you do in another app, and deleting freewrite destroys it. subscribers are not identified either: paying attaches no name and no account to any of this.

where you are is worked out roughly, and it is the one thing here that is about you rather than about the app. PostHog’s servers see the IP address your phone connects from, as every server on the internet does, and turn it into an approximate place — the country, and the region, city or postal district it can infer from that address. we use it for one thing: to see which countries freewrite is reaching, so we know where to bother telling people about it.

this is never a precise location. your iPhone’s own location services are never asked, freewrite holds no permission to ask them, and an address-derived place is an approximation of the network you happen to be on rather than of where you are sitting.

PostHog acts as our data processor and is hosted in the European Union. none of it is sold, shared with data brokers, or combined with data from anywhere else, and none of it is used to advertise to you. knowing which countries the app is reaching does shape where we spend a small marketing budget — but that is a decision about a map, not about you: nobody here is targeted, profiled, or shown an advert because of anything in this section. the lawful basis we rely on is our legitimate interest in making the app better for the people using it; if you would rather we held none of it, see section 10.

their policy: posthog.com/privacy

6. this website

the page you are reading is hosted by Netlify, and we look at its traffic: how many people came, which pages they read, which links sent them, and roughly which countries they were in. those figures are counted from the server’s own request logs — the record any web server keeps of what it was asked for, which includes the IP address that asked. the country is worked out from that.

there is no tracking script on this site, and the one cookie it can set is a language choice. if you switch the site between english and russian, your browser keeps a cookie called lang holding those two letters and nothing else, for a year, so the site can remember which language you asked for. nothing else is written to your browser, nothing follows you to another site, and there is no banner to dismiss because there is nothing to consent to.

the app works out an approximate place the same way, for the same reason — section 5 covers that. neither is a precise location and neither uses your phone’s location services.

7. permissions the app may ask for

each of these is optional, off until you use the feature, and can be revoked in iOS Settings at any time.

• microphone and speech recognition — if you use voice freewriting, so you can speak instead of type. recognition runs on the device; no audio is uploaded, and no recording is kept.
• camera — if you shoot a photograph to put behind a quote card. it is used to make the card on your phone and is never uploaded.
• saving to your photos — if you keep a quote card, iOS asks permission to add it to your library. freewrite can add pictures; it cannot read the ones already there. choosing an existing photo for a card goes through Apple’s own picker, which hands the app only the picture you picked and needs no permission at all.
• notifications — if you turn on a writing reminder. these are scheduled by iOS on the device; there is no server sending you anything, and we cannot see whether you opened one.
• Apple Health — if you turn on the optional mood mirror, a mood you record is written to Health. the app never reads anything from Health, and this is off unless you switch it on.

8. the home screen widgets

the widgets show a prompt, your writing tree, or a year of days you wrote. the widget cannot reach your entries even in principle — the app hands it a small summary file — counts, a prompt, and the mood colour for each day — and no entry text ever crosses that boundary. the widgets carry no analytics of their own and make no network requests.

9. children

freewrite is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. nothing anyone writes reaches us, and the usage analytics in section 5 record features rather than people.

10. your rights

because your writing never reaches us, there is no copy of it for us to hand over, correct or delete. deleting the app removes every entry from your device — permanently, and with no way for us to recover it, so export anything you want to keep first.

your profile — the name, gender and email address described above — can be deleted on its own, without deleting the app, in settings.

the usage analytics are the one thing about you that we hold, and there is an honest catch in getting them removed: they are keyed to a random identifier generated on your phone, not to your name or your email, so we have no way to look your records up from an email address. that is the direct cost of not identifying you in the first place, and we would rather have it that way round. write to us and we will do what we can. deleting the app also ends the collection outright, because the identifier goes with it.

for that, for the data RevenueCat holds on our behalf, or any question about this policy, email support@freewrite.co.uk. if you are in the UK or the EU, you also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

11. changes

if this policy changes in a way that affects what happens to your writing, we will update the date at the top and say what changed. the version you are reading is the current one.

what changed in september 2026: freewrite 2.0 added usage analytics (section 5), and we began reading this website’s server-log traffic figures (section 6). neither touches your writing.