Support & help

Shadow work is a psychological practice rooted in the ideas of Carl Jung, who described the "shadow" as the parts of ourselves we've pushed out of conscious awareness — the anger, shame, envy, fear, and self-criticism we've learned to hide from ourselves and others.

The practice is simple in concept and difficult in execution: look honestly at those hidden parts, write about them, feel them, and integrate them. Ember is a tool to help you do that, one prompt at a time.

Ember is not therapy, and it is not a substitute for working with a qualified mental health professional. If you are struggling, please reach out to one.

Open the app. You'll see a single prompt. Tap it, write whatever comes up — however long or short — and when you're done, choose to keep the entry or burn it.

If you want a new prompt on the same day, tap "Show me another." If you enabled the daily reminder, you'll get a gentle notification at the time you set.

There is no streak, no word count, no right way to use the app. Missing a day costs you nothing.

Burning an entry permanently and irreversibly deletes the text from your device. The animation isn't decorative — the text is actually gone. There is no trash folder, no undo, no cloud backup to recover from (because Ember never uploads anything), and no way for us or Apple or anyone to retrieve it.

Ember keeps a small record that a burn happened on a given date — but not what was written — so your history screen can show how many entries you've released over time.

This is a deliberate design choice. The act of releasing something is part of the work. If everything is archived, nothing is released.

Everything you write stays on your iPhone. Ember has no user accounts, no server of ours, and no cloud sync. The only network traffic the app produces is Apple's own purchase check — when you open the unlock screen, complete a purchase, or tap Restore Purchases. That goes to Apple, never to us, and it never includes a single word of your writing. Everything else works identically in airplane mode.

Your entries are included in standard iOS backups (iCloud Backup or encrypted Mac backups) only if you have those backups enabled at the device level — that's a system feature, not something Ember does.

See the Privacy Policy for the complete picture.

Ember is free to download and free to try. You can keep your first three entries at no cost — enough to find out whether this kind of writing is for you before any money changes hands.

After that, there are two ways to unlock the app:

• Lifetime — a single one-time purchase. You pay once, it never renews, and it never expires. This is the one we'd point you to.
• Weekly — an auto-renewing subscription, for people who'd rather not pay up front.

Both unlock exactly the same thing: all 370 prompts, unlimited kept entries, burn mode, Live Activity support, and notifications. There is no third tier, no feature held back from either option, and no ads in any of it.

Current prices are always shown on the App Store listing and on the unlock screen inside the app, in your local currency.

The weekly subscription renews automatically until you cancel it. Payment is charged to your Apple Account, and renewal happens within 24 hours of the end of the current period unless you turn it off beforehand.

To cancel: open Settings on your iPhone → tap your name at the top → Subscriptions → Ember → Cancel Subscription. You can also manage it from the App Store app under your account picture.

Cancelling stops future charges. Your access continues to the end of the period you've already paid for. We can't cancel or refund a subscription on your behalf — Apple handles all billing, and we never see your payment details. Refund requests go to Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com.

If you buy the Lifetime unlock while a weekly subscription is active, cancel the subscription yourself using the steps above — it will not stop on its own.