Saturday · August 22 · 2026

Journal · nine MCP tools & a console

The journal younever have to open.

Say “journal this” to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor and the page is already written. Or open the app and talk to an AI that has read all of it.

Start free trial → See the mechanism

$15/mo · or $150 yearly, two months free
14-day free trial — cancel any time
the same subscription opens every Parsons app, across unlimited projects

Door oneYou already live in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor. Paste one connection and say “journal this” mid-sentence.

Door twoYou don’t run any of that. Open the app — it lands you in a conversation with your own journal, no setup.

Claude · in progress

Claude…so the batching was on the wrong axis the whole time. That’s why the writes stalled.

You

Claude · add_entrySaved to today’s page. That’s the fourth entry this month that mentions batching — want them side by side?

Your journallive

Aug 22, 2026via mcp

The batching was on the wrong axis the whole time. That’s why the writes stalled.

Aug 21, 2026via web

Slept badly, wrote for twenty minutes anyway. Worth it.

Aug 19, 2026via chat

Asked the journal what I was worried about in March. Mostly the rebuild.

This

1

gesture: you typed it

A journaling app

7

unlock, find, wait, template, blank page, nothing to say, close

no app was opened.

9 MCP tools/ 20,000 characters per page/ bm25-ranked full-text search/ reading is never billed/ unlimited separate journals

The pain, named02

You didn’t fail atjournaling.

Everybody’s journal looks like this. Dense in January. Thin by February. Then a flat grey line for the rest of the year, and a subscription you keep meaning to cancel.

The shape of itThe habit didn’t die of weak willpower. It died of a trip you stopped taking.

A year of a journalling habit — illustration364 days

JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec

wrote something a line or two nothing

“I forgot about it after a week.”

the objection this whole product was built against

If it takes more than a couple of taps, I won’t do it.friction, stated flatly

Another subscription, and the AI is the expensive tier.the AI-tax objection

Paid for premium. It unlocked nothing.entitlement failures

If this app dies, where do my entries go?lock-in anxiety

Those four are the objections we designed against, written in the first person because that is how they are felt. They are composites — not quotes, not from named people, not from customers of ours. We have no star rating and no user count to show you, so we are not going to invent one.

The turn03

It was never discipline.It was the trip.

Every rival’s journal is a destination — an app you have to travel to. Ours is a sentence you say where you already are. Watch both routes start at the same instant.

Open a journalling appstalls at “blank page”

unlock

find the app

wait

pick a template

blank page

nothing to say

close

Say it where you already arelands, first beat

“journal this”

Same start. One arrives.The friction budget for journaling is about one gesture — so we spent exactly one.

Our read on why this stays rare: if the app itself is the retention model, an endpoint that lets somebody else’s AI write into your journal is a hard thing to justify shipping. We can’t promise nobody else will. We can point at the one that already exists.

The mechanism04

Four doors.One store.

Journal is nine MCP tools with a console on top. Write from Cursor, read it back in ChatGPT, edit it in the browser — it is the same row in the same table either way, scoped to you and to one project.

Claude

ChatGPT

Cursor

the web console

one connection

D1 · journal-db · table entriesscoped (project_id, user_id)

add_entry recent_entries search_entries get_entry on_this_day update_entry delete_entry journal_stats whoami

One connection · minted for you at sign-in. Paste it once into Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor. Get yours →

9

MCP tools

20,000

chars per entry

240

char previews on list tools

240 / 240s

console rate limit, per user

There is no per-app MCP endpoint for Journal — those mounts were retired platform-wide. Your connection is a hub profile URL minted at sign-in, so it carries whatever tools you have granted, not just Journal’s. MCP tool calls are uncapped and never billed.

The other door05

Don’t run an MCP client?It ships with its own AI.

The app opens in a conversation, not on a blank page. It has read your journal and it can write to it. Nothing to install, nothing to connect — and you pick how hard it thinks.

you — “what have I actually been worried about this month?”

search_entries · recent_entriesBalanced · claude-sonnet-5

Model usage bills to your prepaid wallet at provider cost × 1.5. Your subscription buys the app; it does not buy the tokens. We would rather you read that here than find it later.

Tap-to-prompt, so there is never a blank page

“What was I writing about a year ago today?”

“Journal this: the batching was on the wrong axis.”

“Find the week I decided to rebuild it.”

“How many days have I actually written this month?”

The chat calls the same nine tools your own assistant would. It is not a second, separate journal — ask it to write and the entry lands in the same store, tagged via chat.

Writing06

Sometimes youdo want to sit down.

Timeline mode is a real writing surface, not a note field. Twenty thousand characters a page. ⌘↵ keeps it. Earlier pages sit above, expandable from preview to full text.

Today’s page · Aug 22, 2026

0 / 20,000 characters ⌘ ↵ keep this page

Kept · newest first

Aug 22, 2026via web

Rough morning, good afternoon. The thing I have been avoiding for three weeks took forty minutes once I started…

Aug 20, 2026via mcp

Said “journal this” halfway through a review and forgot I’d done it until now.

Aug 17, 2026via web

Long one. Wrote about the move, the year before the move, and why I keep circling it.

Every page records where it was written — web, mcp or chat. That tag is not decoration; it is a real column, and section 09 shows what it tells you about your own habit.

Finding a day07

Ask in plain words.Here is exactly what runs.

Plain-language querying is real — but it works by your AI turning your sentence into a keyword query. We would rather show you the machinery than let you assume something smarter is happening.

1 · what you type, and what your AI distils it to

that volume breakthrough, sometime in the spring

volumeANDbreakthrough

Your assistant picks the terms — the engine has no stoplist and drops nothing. Terms are lowercased letters and digits, up to 12, all ANDed.

2 · the tool call

search_entries({ query: "volume breakthrough", limit: 20 })

Your assistant makes this call. So does the built-in chat. So does ⌘K in the console.

3 · what comes back

Apr 14rank 1

The volume test finally passed — forty thousand writes in one go. Feels like a breakthrough, or at least the first honest one this month.

Mar 29rank 2

Talked the volume problem through out loud. The breakthrough was realising we were batching on the wrong axis.

SQLite FTS5 · terms ANDed · ORDER BY rank (bm25)

What is trueRanking is real bm25, over every entry you have ever written — including ones you edited later, because the index is rebuilt by triggers on write.

What is notIt is not semantic. A result must contain every term. Every hit above genuinely contains both words — we are not going to illustrate a match the engine would not return.

One more honesty note: over MCP, recent_entries, search_entries and on_this_day return 240-character previews. Only get_entry returns the full page. Your assistant reads the preview, then fetches the one you meant. The web console’s own search returns full text.

On this day08

One day,across the years.

The reason a journal is worth keeping is that it eventually starts giving back. Ask for the same calendar date and up to twenty past pages come back at once.

Ask for itThere is no look-back button in the web app yet. You ask — in the built-in chat, or with on_this_day from your own AI.

“What was I writing on this day in past years?”

2025Aug 22via mcp

Signed the lease. Sat in the empty room afterwards with the door open and did not feel any of the things I expected to feel…

240-character preview · get_entry for the full page

2024Aug 22via web

Third week of the slog. Wrote two paragraphs about wanting to quit and then did not quit, which is apparently how that works…

240-character preview · get_entry for the full page

2023Aug 22via chat

Hot, loud, nothing working. Noted it anyway so future me knows this week existed and that it passed…

240-character preview · get_entry for the full page

20

past pages returned, maximum, for one calendar date

%m-%d

the match — same month and day, any year

free

reading is metered for visibility, never billed, never capped

By the numbers09

A habit hookwith no guilt in it.

journal_stats returns four things. None of them is a streak — we do not compute one and we are not going to. The interesting one is the last: because there is more than one door in, it can tell you where your journaling actually happens — which is not a thing a single-app journal has any way to answer.

771

entries

402

distinct days written

2025‑02‑22

first page

2026‑06‑07

most recent in this import

where each page was writtensource column, per entry

mcp — said it to an assistant web — sat down and wrote chat — asked the app to write it

This slab is the author’s own journal — 771 entries spanning 2025-02-22 to 2026-06-07, migrated from the previous version with original ids, sources and timestamps preserved. It is the only proof artifact we legitimately have, so it is the only one we show. The entry count and the two dates are real; the distinct-days figure and the source split are illustrative of the shape, not published metrics.

no streak counterThe code does not compute one. Guilt is not a retention feature.

Destroying a page10

It makes you readwhat you are about to destroy.

A private journal is only worth keeping if it cannot be lost by accident — especially now that an agent can reach it. So delete_entry refuses the first time, every time, and quotes the page back at you before it will do anything.

delete_entry · two-stepstep 1 of 2

› delete_entry({ id: "ent_9f2c…" }) ← refused — confirmation required this entry is from Mar 29, 2026. Preview: “Talked the volume problem through out loud. The breakthr…” 80-character preview. Re-send with confirm: true if this is the one.

› delete_entry({ id: "ent_9f2c…", confirm: true }) ← deleted. 1 row removed from entries, 1 from entries_fts.

The same ritual in the console

“Talked the volume problem through out loud. The breakthrough was realising we were batching on the wrong axis.”

Two taps. The first one only arms it.

And the other half: update_entry Edit a page in place and pass the full new text. The search index is rebuilt by a trigger on the write, so an edited page stays findable by whatever you changed it to — not by what it used to say.

The same care runs the other way. add_entry takes an idempotency key, so a retried “journal this” — the exact failure agents cause — returns the same entry instead of writing a second copy of your day.

Whose journal is it11

Erasure thathands you a receipt.

Anyone journaling into an AI now asks whose text it is. Rather than a badge, here is the actual thing: the platform’s deletion orchestrator calls Journal’s purge, and purge answers with per-table counts.

POST /internal/purgebefore

table	scope	rows
entries	every row in the project	771
entries_fts	derived index, dropped by trigger	771

the entries count is the audit number returned to the caller; the index row follows it by trigger

Scoped, always

The data layer binds both your project id and your user id when it is constructed. No code path hands back an entry’s text without both. (One query counts rows by project alone — that is the monthly allowance tally, and it reads no words.)

Reading is free forever

journal_reads is metered for visibility only. No plan cap exists for it and it is never billed. Re-read the whole thing every day for a decade; it costs nothing.

Not a feed, not training data

Your entries are not published, not sold, and not used to train anything. The store is one table, scoped to you.

And what we are not claiming, said out loud

No end-to-end encryption. We are not going to imply it.
No one-click export button — there is no export endpoint today. What is true: every page stays readable from your own AI, and you can page the whole journal backwards with the before cursor on recent_entries.
We are not a therapist and there is no legal privilege here.
No compliance badges. If a page shows you one, ask what it was audited against.

As many as you want12

A separate journalfor each life. All free.

Projects are the platform’s isolation boundary, and nothing in the code counts how many you make. One for the business, one for the personal life, one for the book — separate entry stores, erasable separately. Every entry is scoped to you inside one project, so a project is never a shared journal. There is no seat to upgrade here, because there is no per-seat pricing anywhere on this platform.

Project · switch or create

Personal418 entries$0

The business262 entries$0

The book91 entries$0

Sabbatical0 entries$0

your monthly bill$15.00

Isolated. Entries live under (project_id, user_id). A search in one project cannot see another’s pages.

Yours to erase separately. Purge one project and the others are untouched — with a receipt for the one you erased.

One thing is shared on purpose: the monthly entry allowance is counted account-wide, across every project. Five journals do not buy you five allowances — that would just be the cap with extra steps.

Four journals in that switcher — an illustration, not an account. Add a fifth if you like: the number at the bottom does not move. A tool that bills by the workspace charges again for every one of these; a tool that bills by the seat charges again for every person. Neither meter exists here.

Honest scorecard13

Where we win.Where we lose.

A table that only flatters us reads as a lie, so the losses are set in the same weight as the wins. If one of them is a dealbreaker for you, better you find out here than in week three.

	Where Parsons Journal wins	Where it loses
Capture	Write from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor over one endpoint, mid-conversation, with an idempotency key so a retry cannot double-post.	No native iPhone or Android app. It is a web console, plus whatever AI client you already have on your phone.
The AI	A built-in chat with a real model picker — Quick, Balanced, Deep — that has read your journal and can write to it. Zero setup.	AI usage bills separately, from a prepaid wallet, at provider cost × 1.5. It is not bundled into the subscription.
Finding things	bm25-ranked full-text search over every entry ever, including edited ones. Ranking is real, not a filter.	Keyword, not semantic. Plain-language querying goes through the AI, which turns it into terms.
Looking back	on_this_day returns up to 20 past pages for the same calendar date, from any client.	No look-back surface in the web app yet — you have to ask for it.
Portability	Every page stays readable from your own AI over the same connection, and pages backwards with a cursor.	No one-click export, no DOCX or PDF, no self-host. There is no export endpoint today.
Privacy	Scoped per (project, user), with a real purge that returns per-table audit counts.	No end-to-end encryption claim, and no compliance badges.
Feature surface	Edit in place, a two-step delete, per-entry source tags, stats, unlimited separate journals.	No photos, no voice capture, no location, no mood tracking. All four were cut from v1 on purpose.
Price	$15/mo — or $150 a year, two months free. One subscription opens every other Parsons app, across unlimited projects, with nothing charged per seat or per workspace.	Judged as a journal on its own, $15 is more than a dedicated journalling app charges — the bundle is the argument, not the sticker. No free tier either: a trial, then you pay.

Nothing on this page has a star rating, a testimonial or a customer logo, because we have none to show. The dogfooded journal in section 09 is the author’s own, and it is labelled as such.

Pricing14

The cap, shown.Not buried.

There is a monthly entry allowance and we would rather you check it against your own habit right now. Drag it. The verdict changes underneath.

How many pages do you write a month? 30

against the allowance the subscription includes

02,000 included

Parsons Base

$15 / month

or $150 / year — two months free

2,000 journal entries a month, account-wide, reset at the start of the UTC month
Reading, searching and looking back — never billed, never capped
All nine MCP tools; tool calls are uncapped and free
Unlimited projects — a separate journal for each
Every other Parsons app and service on the same subscription

Parsons Base$15.00 / mo

Journal — 2,000 entries/moincluded

Reading your journal, any amountnever billed

MCP tool callsuncapped, free

Unlimited projects$0.00

Every other Parsons appincluded

AI chat & model usageprovider cost × 1.5

Subscription, all in$15.00 / mo

or paid yearly — two months free$150.00 / yr

Monthly or yearly, your choice at checkout. Yearly is $150 — against $180 paid a month at a time, so it is exactly two months free. Not a rounded “save 20%”; check the arithmetic.
14-day free trial on your first subscription — cancel any time. Checkout does collect a card; we are not going to pretend otherwise. Cancelling and resubscribing does not start a second trial.
No free tier. Trial, then $15/mo. Nothing per seat, nothing per project, and no enterprise tier to be routed into.
Write past the allowance and the extra entries simply draw from your prepaid credits, priced at roughly wholesale-plus-half — the bill starts when real usage does, not before. Everything already written stays readable throughout — free, forever.
The AI wallet is prepaid and separate, with its own spend caps. The subscription is access, not a metered bill in disguise.

“Fifteen dollars — for a journal?”

Not for a journal. Priced as a journal alone, a dedicated journalling app costs less than this, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What the subscription buys is the slab underneath — one auth service, one billing spine, one MCP hub, one storage layer, one edge runtime — and every Parsons product standing on it. Journal is one of them. Money, Tracker, CRM, Fitness and the rest open on the same $15, in the same account, on the day you decide you want them.

The charges we never send are the other half of the answer. Nothing per seat — there is no seat anywhere on this platform to buy. Nothing per project — projects are the isolation boundary, nothing in the code counts how many you make, and the fourth journal costs exactly what the first one did.

And the parts that genuinely cost money per unit — model tokens, voice minutes, phone numbers, domains — are not in the subscription. They are prepaid, capped and separate. That is what makes $15 an access fee rather than a metered bill wearing a flat rate, and it is why this page named its own upcharge two sections ago.

one slab · every product

auth

billing

mcp hub

storage

database

ai gateway

scheduler

journal

Start free trial →See the whole platform

Questions15

The questions peopleactually ask.

Still unsureEverything here is checkable in fourteen days, and cancelling is self-serve in the billing portal — no email, no retention call.

Do I need Claude to use this?+

No. The app opens in its own AI chat, with a model picker and tap-to-prompt cards. Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor are extra doors, not requirements.

What actually happens when I say “journal this”?+

Your assistant calls add_entry with the text in your own voice, plus an idempotency key. Re-sending the same key returns the same entry instead of writing a duplicate — so a retried tool call cannot double-post your day.

What happens at 2,000 entries?+

The next write goes through — it draws from your prepaid credits at roughly wholesale-plus-half instead of the allowance, and the counter resets at the start of the next UTC month. Everything already written stays readable — free, forever. A hard safety ceiling does still sit far above the allowance as an anti-abuse stop, with an “ask us to raise it” path in the billing console. The allowance is counted across your whole account, not per project.

Does the AI chat cost extra?+

Yes. Model usage bills to a prepaid wallet at provider cost × 1.5. The subscription is the app; it is not the tokens. Reading, searching and looking back cost nothing at all.

What if the app dies?+

Every page stays readable from your own AI over the same connection, and you can page the entire journal backwards with the before cursor on recent_entries. Being straight with you: there is no one-click export button today.

Is there a free plan?+

No. A 14-day free trial on your first subscription — cancel any time — then $15/mo, or $150 a year, which is two months free. Checkout collects a card at the start of the trial.

Can I keep separate journals?+

Yes — as many projects as you want, at no extra cost, each with its own isolated entry store. The monthly entry allowance is shared across the account, which is the one thing that is deliberately not multiplied.

Streaks?+

No. journal_stats returns total entries, distinct days written, a source breakdown and the span from first to last page. It does not compute a streak, and we are not going to add one.

Is it on my phone?+

Not as a native app. It is a web console — and it is inside whatever AI client you already use on your phone, which is where most entries get written anyway.

How do I connect it to my AI?+

Sign in, open the app, hit Connect. It hands you one URL, minted for your account, plus step lists for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. There is no endpoint printed on this page because there is no shared one — yours does not exist until you have an account.

The last page16

Say it once.It’s already written.

$15/mo — or $150 a year, two months free. 14 days free on your first subscription, cancel any time.

Start free trial →Open my journal

Claude · waiting

›

Your journal · empty

no pages yet