Auramenta - The journal that reads between the lines

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Auramenta is a private journal for iOS. You write, and an engine on your phone reads your entries back and surfaces recurring phrases and slow patterns over weeks. Tendencies, never verdicts. Eight languages, each with its own engine, and thousands of hand-written phrase rules across them. No LLM, no external AI service. No accounts, no tracking, no server of our own. What you write is encrypted on your phone. The optional iCloud backup is encrypted before it leaves. Free to start.

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If it reads between the lines, what does it do with what it infers that the writer never chose to say?

 Honestly, less than the name promises.

It shows you your own words back. The phrases you keep using, the things that come up week after week. It might say a week looked lighter than the one before. It won't tell you why, or what that says about you. I didn't want to build that part. That's where a journal stops being yours and starts being someone's opinion of you.

The one place it does act on what it reads is the safety layer. If something looks like a crisis it puts a helpline in front of you rather than an opinion.

None of it is sent to me. You're the only one reading it.

 That restraint is protective, not just modest. Telling someone what their words say about them trains them to accept an outside reading of themselves, and that is the opening every manipulator works from. I work on fraud, and the people hurt worst are usually the ones who learned to trust someone else's read over their own.

On the safety layer helplines are region specific and they go stale. A wrong number at the moment someone reaches for it spends the only attempt they had.

 I hadn't thought about it from that angle. I got there for a simpler reason, not wanting to be wrong about someone. Yours holds even when the reading is right, which is worse.

You're right about the helplines. They're hardcoded anyway, because a tel: link works with no signal and nothing to load, and someone reaching for it can't wait on a directory. I took the staleness to get that.

I re-checked every line by hand on 3 August against its official source, and a job nags me every 180 days. The numbers follow the phone's region rather than the app language, so an English app on a UK phone still gets UK lines.

Find A Helpline is in there as a backstop, but only when I have no number for your country at all. Present-but-wrong is the case I did not cover, and I will fix that.

 Hardcoding for the offline case is the right trade, and a 180 day recheck by hand is more than most people do. Region over app language is the harder call, because someone writing in one language on a phone set to another is often the person least likely to have anyone local to call. Good luck with it.

Hi Product Hunt, I'm Nelson. I built Auramenta alone, over three years of nights and weekends, in Portugal.

It started in a hard year, when I needed somewhere to put what was happening. Every journaling app felt like homework: you feed it pages and it gives nothing back. Mood trackers felt shallow. A journal, I thought, should do the reading too.

So that is what Auramenta does. You write, and an engine on your phone reads your entries back and surfaces the phrases that keep returning and the patterns that build over weeks. Tendencies, never verdicts.

The reading runs on your device, without an LLM or an external AI service. The analysis uses shared code with language-specific vocabulary and regional rules, supporting six languages in eight locale variants, including Brazilian and European Portuguese.

That choice made privacy simple. No accounts, no tracking, no server of my own. What you write is encrypted at rest on your phone with SQLCipher. Voice notes and photos are stored as ordinary files, not encrypted the same way. The optional iCloud backup is off until you turn it on, and it is encrypted before it leaves the device.

For the curious: React Native + Expo + TypeScript, SQLite with SQLCipher, on-device NLP. Voice notes with opt-in on-device transcription, mood logs, weekly goals, a Trends view, and a Journey timeline. iOS 16.4 and up. Android in Q4 2026.

Update, September 10: The launch-week PRODUCTHUNT offer ended on August 25. Auramenta is free on iPhone. Eligible new subscribers can try Auramenta+ free for 14 days on the annual plan. See the current subscription and renewal terms in the app.

Get Auramenta for iPhone:

I will be here all day, hard questions especially welcome. What would make you trust a journal enough to be honest in it?