Most journaling apps keep your entries on someone else's computer. They might encrypt them. They might mean well. But the writing — the most personal thing you'll ever type — is still sitting in a database somewhere, behind a login screen you don't control.
I built Cozy because I wanted a journal that didn't have that problem in the first place.
What "private" actually means here
Cozy is a desktop app with no backend, so there's nowhere for your entries to be uploaded. There's no sign-up and no profile. The app doesn't phone home to count taps or words or sessions. And your journal is just a folder — if you want it on two devices, you put the folder in iCloud Drive or Dropbox yourself.
Your entries are files you can read
Every Cozy entry is a plain text file in a folder on your computer. You can open that folder right now in your file manager. You can open any entry in any text editor. They're not locked inside a database.
If the app disappears tomorrow, you still have your journal. That's the point.
Privacy and AI
There's a quieter privacy problem in most journaling apps right now: AI. A lot of them have added writing assistants, summaries, or chat features, and most of those don't run on your computer — they send your entries to OpenAI, Anthropic, or another model provider. Even if the journaling app itself never reads what you wrote, those companies do, because the app is really just a wrapper around their API.
Cozy doesn't have any AI features at all. Your entries aren't sent to a model, because there is no model. If you ever want AI in the loop, you get to make that decision yourself — which tool, which entries, on what terms — instead of the app deciding for you. I wrote about this in more detail in why Cozy doesn't have AI.
Plain files outlive the app
The other half of staying private is staying readable. Plain text files are the one format that every app and every operating system already knows how to open. If Cozy is ever gone, or you want to move your journal somewhere else, the files just work. No export, no migration tool, no format that only one company understands.
Why this matters
A private journal is the place you write the things you wouldn't say out loud. Worries, frustrations, the small things you're working through. If that writing is sitting in someone else's database, it isn't really private. It's private until something changes about the company holding it.
Cozy fixes that by taking the company out of the loop. The journal is on your machine. The only thing standing between you and your entries is the password you already use to log into your computer.
What about syncing across devices?
Cozy doesn't run a sync service. But because the journal is just a folder, you can put it inside iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing, or any similar tool and it syncs the same way your photos and documents do. You decide which service to trust, or you decide to trust none of them and keep the folder on one machine.
Related reading: an offline journaling app, a journaling app for plain text files, and a journaling app without a subscription.