A journal gets held to a higher standard than most software, and it should. People ask me two things before they'll write anything real in one: who can see this, and what happens when you get bored and move on? Both are fair. Here are the actual answers, not the reassuring version.
There's no account, and no server holding your journal
You don't sign up for Cozy. There's no email, no password, no profile, and nothing to log into. When you create a journal, you pick a folder on your own device, and that folder is the journal. Cozy reads and writes files in it, the same way a text editor does.
This isn't a policy I could quietly change later. There is no server that holds entries, so there is no switch to flip. Your writing never reaches me because there's nowhere for it to arrive.
If you put that folder in iCloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive, then those services sync it under their own terms. That's your arrangement with them, and Cozy stays out of it.
Everything that leaves your device
Cozy is offline almost all of the time. Here's every time it uses the network and what each one sends. Where you can switch it off, I've said so.
Your licence
When you paste your key, and quietly about once a week after that, Cozy checks your licence with my licence server. It sends the key itself, a random ID generated on your machine, and, the first time only, a device label built from your computer's name, so you can tell your Mac from your PC when you manage your activations.
That's all it sends. No entry, filename, or folder name is involved.
Crash reports
When something breaks, Cozy sends a report to Sentry (hosted in Europe) so I can fix it. Reports carry the error, the line of code, and your app version. Before anything is sent, Cozy rewrites file paths to strip your username and home folder, because even a path can give away more than you'd like.
Your writing is never in a crash report. You can turn reports off entirely in Settings → Privacy, and when they're off, nothing is sent: the report is dropped inside the app before it reaches the network.
Map tiles
If an entry has a location and you open the map, Cozy loads map images from
CARTO (basemaps.cartocdn.com). Like any request on the web,
that provider sees your IP address and which squares of map you asked for.
On desktop, those requests are made by Cozy itself rather than by the map view, and every tile is kept on disk afterwards. So a place you've looked at once draws again with no network at all, and CARTO sees it once rather than every time you revisit that memory.
Place names
Turning coordinates into "Lisbon" happens on your device, from a city database bundled inside the app. On a Mac, Cozy first asks the system's own geocoder for a more precise name. That's the same service Maps and Photos use, so Apple handles that lookup the way it would for any Apple app. Cozy never sends your coordinates to me.
Spell-check dictionaries
On Windows and Linux, the spellchecker needs a dictionary file. Cozy
downloads it from cozyjournal.app rather than from Google's CDN,
which is where it would go by default. A private journal shouldn't have to phone
Google to check your spelling. On a Mac nothing is downloaded at all, because
macOS has its own spellchecker built in.
Update checks
Cozy asks GitHub whether there's a newer version. It sends nothing but the request itself; GitHub sees your IP address, as any website would. Turn it off in Settings and Cozy stops asking.
Embedded video
If you paste a YouTube or Vimeo link and press play, your device talks to YouTube or Vimeo, the same as opening the link in a browser. Nothing loads until you press play.
Dictation, on iPhone
Dictation uses Apple's speech recognition. Cozy prefers the on-device engine and will download the offline model for your language so your voice never leaves the phone. Until that model has arrived, iOS falls back to its standard recognition, which processes audio on Apple's servers. Either way the audio goes to Apple, never to me.
That's the whole list. There's no analytics in the app, no usage tracking, no advertising, and nothing that watches how you write.
Your journal, without Cozy
Every entry is one plain Markdown file. Open one in any text editor and it looks like this:
---
title: Coffee with Marta
date: 2026-06-07
tags: [friends, lisbon]
location: Lisbon, Portugal
---
We took the long way round, past the tiled house she likes.A small block of details at the top, then your writing. Photos, video, and audio sit in the same folder as the entries that use them. There's no database, no proprietary container, and no export step — the export already happened, every time you typed.
That means you can open your journal in any editor, search it with the tools you already have, back it up by copying a folder, and take it to another app whenever you like. Cozy is a nice way to read and write these files. It was never the only way.
On your iPhone, it's in the Files app
Your journals appear under On My iPhone → Cozy in the Files app. That's the real folder Cozy reads and writes, not a copy of it.
You can browse it, open an entry in another app, copy a journal to iCloud Drive, or AirDrop the whole thing to your Mac, without Cozy's permission and without Cozy running. Plug your iPhone into a computer and the folder is there too. If Cozy ever annoys you, your writing isn't trapped behind it.
If I disappear
This is the one people are too polite to ask, so let me answer it plainly. I run Cozy. I could stop — by choice, by circumstance, or by being hit by a bus. A journal you'll still want in twenty years shouldn't depend on my continued attendance.
Cozy never locks you out because a check failed. Once your licence is activated, an unreachable licence server changes nothing. Not after a week, not after a year, not ever. Cozy can only stop being licensed if a server you actually reached tells it, clearly and twice, that the key is no longer valid. Silence is not evidence, so silence is treated as fine.
There's a key that works with no server at all. Cozy can be unlocked by a signed licence file that it verifies entirely on its own, with the network switched off. If the licence server ever goes away for good, one of those gets published, and every copy of Cozy that exists, including fresh installs on new computers, unlocks by pasting it in. It doesn't expire, and it doesn't need me to be around when you use it.
And underneath all of it, your journal is just files. Even in the worst version of this story, where the app itself stops running on some future operating system, the folder on your disk is still Markdown and still photos. Every entry you wrote stays readable by things that have nothing to do with me.
Questions
If something here is unclear, or you want a detail I haven't covered, email me at [email protected]. The full legal version lives in the privacy policy.