How it works
Vellum is a daily prompt journal for parents. One question and one small mission arrive each morning; you answer in about fifteen seconds, one-handed, and the answer is filed with the question that caused it. That last part is the whole product.
So here is how it actually goes — laid out the way Vellum lays out everything: on a timeline. It starts tomorrow morning and runs to the morning they turn eighteen.
Tomorrow · 7:00 a.m.
The morning card
One notification, at a time you pick. Open it and there are two things: a question and a mission. Not a feed, not a dashboard, not eleven things you're behind on.
There are four kinds you'll see most days — a question, a capture mission, an activity with nothing to upload, and occasionally a letter. All 133 are published, so you can read every one before you sign up for anything.
What are they pretending to be this week?
Photograph their hands. Just their hands.
Fifteen seconds later
The four ways to answer
The fifteen-second claim is a real constraint, not a slogan. Each of these is one tap from the card, and none of them opens a form.
Camera opens on the card. Shoot, keep, done. The prompt is attached before you've put the phone down.
PhotoHold to record, up to two minutes. Transcribed on your phone, so the words are searchable and the audio never leaves for a transcription service.
Tell me the dinosaur one again. No, the loud dinosaur one. VoiceTwo sentences is plenty. Most entries are shorter than this paragraph.
He asked if the moon follows only our car. I said yes. WrittenThat week · that month
Missions: daily, weekly, monthly
Most days it's small. Once a week something slightly bigger lands — film the bedtime routine start to finish, one take. Once a month a measurement mission asks for a number: height, hand, foot, the things you'll want on a chart later and will never reconstruct from memory.
Monthly
Trace their hand on paper. Photograph it next to last month's.
Whenever you get to it
Backdating, which is normal here
The day something happened and the day you got around to writing it down are two different facts, and Vellum keeps both. File a memory under the day it happened, whenever you get to it. Nothing marks it as late, because it isn't.
This is also the answer to “my kid is seven, is it too late?” — no. Plenty of a real archive will be older than the app that holds it.
Year three
The timeline
Everything lands in one place, grouped by date, with their age stamped on every day header. You are never doing arithmetic to work out whether he was three or four.
Year nine
Search, and why the prompt matters
Search runs across everything you wrote, every transcript of something they said, and every prompt you were asked. That third one is what nothing else has.
Searching a camera roll means searching dates, places and whatever the machine thinks it sees. Searching Vellum means searching the questions — “afraid of”, “pretending to be”, “wouldn't let us correct” — which is much closer to how you'll actually remember it in twenty years.
Any given night
Letters, sealed until an age you pick
Some prompts ask you to write forward — a letter to who they'll be at eighteen, or what you'd want them to know if you weren't around to say it. You choose when it opens. A letter meant for eighteen stays shut until eighteen.
Every day in between
Second parent, one archive
Both parents answer into the same archive, and it's one subscription, not two. Whoever was there that day writes it down. Neither of you has to reconstruct the other's week.
Year eighteen
Export, which is the actual promise
One tap gives you a zip: every entry, every photo, every recording, in folders by date —
plus an index.html you double-click. It opens in any browser, offline, with
no account and no internet. No app required, including this one.
Free, complete, always. Even on the free tier. Even if you stopped paying years ago. It's built that way because an archive meant to last eighteen years shouldn't depend on this company lasting eighteen years. The rest of that promise is here.
A daily prompt journal for parents, starting tomorrow
Vellum opens on iPhone soon. The prompts don't wait for it — one lands in your inbox tomorrow morning, free, and backdating means you can file tonight's answer under tonight whenever the app arrives.
One a day, by email. A note when it opens and when the price goes live. Nothing else.