The promise
What happens to the archive
Vellum is an ad free childhood memory app, and that phrase is doing more work than it looks like. It means there is no second customer. Nobody is buying access to your child, now or at a bigger scale, which is why the rest of this page can say what it says.
This page exists because you shouldn't have to find any of it out later.
01
An ad-free childhood memory app: no ads, no data sale
Not now, not at a bigger scale, not ever. Nothing about your child is sold, brokered, or used to train anything. There is no advertising on any tier, including the free one.
Some apps in this category show advertising next to your child's photos. This one never will. That isn't a feature we're withholding for a higher plan — it's a business model we didn't pick, and picking it later would require rewriting this page, which is rather the point of writing it.
Sign in with Apple, or Google. There is no Facebook login, because routing a private record of a child through an ad company contradicts the thing being sold.
02
Private by default
The archive is private unless you invite someone. There is no feed, no likes, no discovery, and no follower count. Nobody outside the people you name can see any of it.
03
If you stop paying
The full version, because this is the part everybody gets burned by.
Nothing is locked
Vellum drops to the free tier. Your whole archive stays readable. You keep answering the daily question — text and did-it entries never stop. New photo and video uploads pause.
After ninety days, originals move to cold storage
Thumbnails stay instant, search still works, and pulling a full-resolution original back takes about an hour. That's a property of the storage, not a penalty.
We never delete a word you wrote unless you ask us to.
Lapsing doesn't cost you a sentence, and neither does going quiet for a year. The one thing that removes your words is you asking us to close your account — and that waits seven days, signs you out, and is cancelled outright the moment you sign back in.
And if media is ever going to be removed, you get warned three times — ninety days out, thirty days out, seven days out — each with a free one-click export of the whole archive. Sign in once during that window and it's cancelled outright. If we can't reach you, we keep it.
No marketing email ever enters one of those warning windows. A deletion notice with an upsell in it is the worst possible version of this product.
04
If we go away
The honest one. Vellum is being built by one person. It might not be here in twenty years, and an archive that assumes otherwise is lying to you.
So the export isn't a compliance checkbox, it's the actual design. One tap gives you a
zip: every entry, every photo, every recording, in folders by date, plus an
index.html you double-click. Plain files, plain folders, a viewer that runs
offline from a double-click with no server and no internet. It was written to be opened
in twenty years by someone who has never heard of us.
An export that needs a server isn't an archive. It's a hostage with visiting hours.
Free, complete, always. Even on the free tier. Even if you stopped paying years ago. The formats are the boring ones on purpose — JPEG, MP4, M4A, plain text and HTML — because boring formats with billions of files in them are the ones the world can't afford to lose. The long version of that argument is here.
05
What we'd never build
Shorter than the rest, and the most useful list on this page.
- ✓No streaks. No counter that punishes a parent for a hard week. The whole argument.
- ✓No guilt notifications. Nothing that says you're behind, because you can't be.
- ✓No public feed. Nothing that makes your child's archive a place other people perform.
- ✓No ads, at any scale. Including the version where it's only on the free tier and only small.
- ✓No export you have to ask for. Or wait for, or pay for, or open an account to read.
06
Where we're weak
A trust page that only lists strengths isn't one. As of August 17, 2026: Vellum is iPhone only. There is no Android app and no web app. There is no printed book. There are no users yet, so there are no reviews and no testimonials on this site — and there won't be invented ones, which for a product selling trustworthiness is the single unrecoverable mistake.
It's one developer. If that's disqualifying, that's a reasonable call, and the export exists precisely so it doesn't have to be a permanent one.
None of this needs an account to try
The prompts are free by email, starting tomorrow morning, and all 133 are published whether you sign up or not.
One a day, by email. A note when it opens and when the price goes live. Nothing else.