A Journal You Pay For Once
Journaling · 2026-07-09 · 5 min read
HushNotes Pro costs $24.99, once, and never renews. Why a journal with no servers can be priced that way, what stays free, and how the 14-day preview and Family Sharing work.
HushNotes Pro costs $24.99, once. It never renews, and you will never get a renewal email. Here is why we priced a journal that way.
Subscriptions make sense for services that cost money every month to run: servers, storage, sync between devices, staff on call. Many journal apps charge yearly because they run exactly those things, and that is a fair way to pay for them.
But a subscription on a journal has an awkward shape. The longer you write, the more you have in it, and the harder it is to leave. When the price goes up, the choice isn’t really “is this worth it this year?” It is “what happens to everything I have written if I stop paying?” Nobody should have to think about that with their own diary.
Why we can charge once
HushNotes has no servers. There is no account, no sync and no storage that grows with every user. Your journal lives on your iPhone, so when you write more, it costs us nothing. The ongoing work is keeping the app good and up to date with new versions of iOS, not paying for a data centre per person.
That is what makes a single price honest rather than a gamble. Our focus app, HushZone, works the same way: no account, and a one-time purchase if you want more. It is a choice about the kind of company we want to be, and it only works because the app doesn’t need anything from you after you buy.
What’s free, always
- Unlimited entries and photos
- Voice entries, turned into text on your iPhone
- The Face ID lock and the Private space
- Import from Day One, a journal saved as web pages, or a text folder
- Export everything as Markdown, PDF or JSON
We kept import and export free on purpose. If it cost money to get your words in or out, the price would work like a lock, not a purchase.
What Pro adds
HushNotes Pro is for looking back. It unlocks Ask your journal, which answers a question with sentences you wrote, each with its date; search by meaning, which finds entries even when you don’t remember the exact words; a weekly review; feeling trends; and letters to your future self. All of it runs on your iPhone and works in Airplane Mode.
The 14-day preview
You can try Pro free for 14 days. It is a timer on your iPhone, not an App Store trial or a subscription: there is no card, nothing to cancel, and nothing is charged when it ends. When the 14 days are up, the Pro tools lock again. Your entries are untouched, and every free feature keeps working.
Family Sharing
HushNotes Pro supports Family Sharing. If you share purchases with your family through your Apple account, one purchase covers the people in your family group. Each person’s journal stays on their own iPhone. Nobody can read anyone else’s entries, and there is no family account to set up, because there are no accounts at all.
What “pay once” means
It means the price on the Pro screen is the whole price for Pro. It doesn’t renew, and you don’t need to remember to cancel anything. The price is $24.99 in the US and varies by region, because Apple sets prices for each country.
It also means your words are never held back by a payment. If you never buy Pro, or if Apple refunds your purchase, everything you wrote stays readable and exportable. Only the Pro tools switch off.
A receipt you can read
In the app, the Pro screen shows the deal as a receipt: HushNotes Pro, $24.99. Renews: never. Account: none. Family Sharing: yes. We think that is how buying software should feel: you can read the whole thing in five seconds, and there is no small print to come back to.