Ten quiet voices
to help you think.
Not tell you what to do.
Council is a journal where ten archetypes — the critic, the caretaker, the rebel, seven more — read what you wrote and reflect it back from angles you wouldn't reach alone.
You don't need more opinions.The premise
You need better ones — including the ones you've been quietly ignoring.
Four steps,
once a day, at most.
Write what's on your mind. Pick which voices to consult. Read the council in your own time — then return to it whenever you like. You can also just journal; the voices stay quiet until you call them.
Write or speak what's on your mind.
One screen. No prompts, no scoring. Voice memos transcribe locally.
Pick the voices you want to hear from.
Three voices on Free, up to six on Pro. Each one reads only the entry you're consulting on — never the rest of your journal.
Read it back — or hear it.
Four short replies, each in its own register. Read them silently, or tap to hear any voice read aloud — the audio is made on your phone. You keep what's useful, leave the rest.
Come back to it whenever you want.
Every session stays on your phone. Reopen one a year later and what felt obvious then often reads differently now.
What we ask,
what we don't.
Council asks for very little, and says plainly what that is. Three free council sessions each month, then a small subscription that unlocks unlimited sessions, six active voices instead of three, and the ability to style each one — a name, a colour, even its own reading voice — and nothing about what you write is ever sold or turned into an ad.
Before you
download.
The ones we're asked most, answered plainly. If yours isn't here, the inbox is a real person — write and ask.
Are my entries used to train models?
No. Your writing is never used to train models — ours or anyone else's. When you summon the council, only the single entry you're consulting on leaves your phone; it's read once to generate the replies, then discarded. Everything else stays on the device. The proxy server in front of the model providers is configured to strip request and response bodies from its logs, so there's no copy of your writing anywhere outside your phone after the consultation completes.
How is Council different from Day One or other journaling apps?
Day One, Journey, and Apple Journal are about capturing life — photos, locations, weather, multimedia. Council is about thinking through what you wrote. It doesn't decorate your entries; it reads them back through ten distinct voices — the critic, the caretaker, the rebel, the sage, six others — each one offering a perspective you might not have reached alone. There's no streak counter, no AI assistant offering advice, no daily prompts. You write when you want, and you summon the voices when you want. Most journaling apps add features. Council subtracts them.
How is Council different from Rosebud, Mindsera, or other AI journaling apps?
Most AI journaling apps are coaches in disguise. They ask follow-up questions, suggest reframings, push you toward action. Council does the opposite: ten voices reflect what you already said, from angles you might not have reached alone, and then they go quiet. They don't advise. They don't get to know you. The cumulative effect is closer to reading your own writing back through ten different readers than to talking to an AI. If you want an AI thinking partner, Rosebud and Mindsera are well-built. Council is for a different kind of attention.
Do the voices know my history? Do they learn?
No. Each voice reads only the single entry you bring to the table. They don’t see previous entries, the other voices’ replies in the same session, or anything about you as a person. There’s no profile, no memory, no preference learning. The trade-off is intentional: an AI that "knows" you starts to confirm patterns it has already inferred, and that’s not the kind of reflection journaling benefits from. The same entry consulted by the same voices on a different day produces a different response. That variance is the point.
Is this a therapist?
No. Council is a journal that reflects your own words back through ten voices. It can ask good questions, but it can’t diagnose, treat, or stand in for a trained human. If something feels acutely heavy, the lines on our safety page are the right place to start. Council is a tool for thinking with yourself; therapy is a relationship with someone trained to help you. They’re complementary, not interchangeable.
What does it cost?
Three free council consultations a month to find your footing, then a small subscription — monthly or yearly, cancel anytime. The three free sessions each month are how you try it; there's no separate free trial, and the cap resets at the start of each UTC calendar month. Journaling itself is always free and unlimited. The App Store paywall shows the current price. Anything you've already written stays yours, whether or not you keep paying. The subscription supports the cost of running the AI proxy and one person's time.
Can the council read replies aloud?
Yes. Tap any reply to hear it spoken, or play the whole council in turn, at a speed that suits you. The audio is made on your phone, so nothing leaves the device. On Free, every voice shares one reading voice; Pro lets you give each council member its own.
Why ten voices? Why those ten?
Ten is enough range to surprise you and small enough to fit at one table. The ten are drawn from archetypes that recur across psychology, narrative, and Internal Family Systems work — the Critic, the Dreamer, the Worrier, the Caretaker, the Rebel, the Pleaser, the Protector, the Skeptic, the Joker, and the Sage. They're not therapists or coaches; they're voices you already carry. Council just gives them names and a place to sit. Your active council holds three voices on Free, up to six on Pro — chosen in Settings — and every session calls on all of them.
Who built it?
One person, on purpose. Council is an independent project with no parent company, no investors leaning on it, and no growth team. Just a notebook, built slowly. The privacy story isn’t marketing — there’s no investor demanding engagement metrics. If you want to read the maker’s working notes, the how it works page is the closest thing.
Sit with the question
before you answer it.
Three free sessions to see if the table feels like the right room. Download on iOS.
Download on the App Store