The false choice
Today you can have analog ritual, or digital search, or real privacy. You usually cannot have all three at once.
Your paper journal, with digital superpowers.
Plume captures your handwritten journal into a private, searchable archive you own, without changing how you write. Early access is being built for iOS. Everything stays on your device, encrypted, in an open format.
Try the beta on TestFlight
Free, in beta, for iPhone.
Years of paper, impossible to search, too precious to lose.
People keep shelves of irreplaceable journals because paper holds a kind of focus screens do not. But those notebooks are fragile, hard to revisit, and often split from the rest of a digital life.
Clunky workarounds
People photograph pages into note apps, retype by hand, or rely on niche notebook systems that ask them to change how they write.
Why now
On-device vision models can finally read real handwriting well enough to make this practical, without sending pages away to a cloud.
Keep writing exactly as you do now.
Plume is designed to fit the journal practice you already have. The product stays quiet so the writing can stay central.
Write on paper
No screen to glance at. No special notebook. No app open while you write. The ritual stays intact.
A camera quietly captures each page
Today that means your phone in a small stand, capturing with the volume button and one soft confirmation when a page is saved.
Your device builds the archive
Each page is cropped, deskewed, and transcribed for search. The original image is always kept. Encryption, sync, and review apps are part of the early-access vision now being built.
How Plume handles your journal today.
The current app keeps the core journal structure on your device, supports an optional user-chosen vault folder, and offers optional encryption. It also has one important current exception: transcription is still sent to a third-party service while the on-device path is being built.
Captures, notebooks, metadata, and imports are stored locally in the app, with an optional vault folder you choose for sync or backup.
Plume supports optional vault encryption, and the app's privacy manifest declares no ad tracking.
The present iOS code uses OpenRouter for transcription with zero-data-retention and no-logging settings requested. More detail lives in the privacy policy.
Plume's long-term direction is stronger on-device privacy. The current app is not there yet, so the privacy policy reflects the code as it exists today.Read the privacy policy.
The handwriting stays central. Search sits beside it.
Transcription is the search layer, never the replacement. The page you wrote by hand remains the thing you return to.
Bring related pages together across notebooks.
Collections add a digital layer on top of paper practice, so themes and projects can come together without asking you to abandon the notebook itself.
Every option today asks you to give something up.
Plume is not trying to win on more features. It is trying to remove the tradeoff.
Product
Paper-friendly
Searchable
Private by design
Open and durable
PlumeYesYesYesYes
reMarkableNoPartialPartialLocked in
Day OneNoYesUnclearNo
ObsidianNo bridgeYesPartialYes
Smart notebooksSpecial paperPartialWeakWeak