You have taken hundreds of photos from the first year. On your phone, in an app, maybe in a cloud service you tried at some point. And then something changes. The company gets acquired. The free version disappears. You suddenly have to pay to access your own photos, or worse: you receive an email saying the service is shutting down and you have thirty days to export everything.
This is no longer an exception. It is simply how things go with many digital services. They start out free, they grow, and at some point the business model changes. You are not part of that decision. Your memories are.
What it means when something truly belongs to you
There is a difference between storing something and owning it. You can store a photo in an app that no longer exists two years from now. You do not truly own it, even if it is sitting right there at this moment.
At YearChapter, the agreement is different. What you write down and add stays yours. Not ours. Not an investor who might acquire us at some point. Not a platform that decides to put a paywall between you and what you have built.
That sounds like something that should go without saying. But in practice, it rarely does.
Photos and memories always yours: why that requires a choice
It takes a deliberate choice to build something where the memories of the user never become the business model. That means we do not earn from your data. That means we do not show you advertisements based on what you have written about your child. And it means that if anything ever changes at YearChapter as a company, your memories do not change hands along with it.
You can export everything. You can always access what you have written. There is no version where you have to pay to reach something you already created.
"I had kept a record for a whole year in an app that suddenly stopped being free. Everything was still in there, but I could not access it without paying. That felt so unfair."
Parent via YearChapter
What that looks like in practice
Every month, YearChapter asks you a few questions. Not at random, but based on what you have already filled in before. What did your child say for the first time that month? How did they respond to something new? What are you already almost forgetting? Those questions help you keep writing without knowing where to start, without a blank screen staring back at you.
You do not need to pick up a journal. You do not need to think long about the format. You type in an answer, and it is there. Small, but yours.
At the end of the year, that becomes a yearbook. Printed, tangible, something that does not disappear when a server somewhere gets switched off. You can read more about what that yearbook looks like on the page about the difference between a yearbook and a photo book.
The promise behind the product
I understand this sounds like something any company can say. Trust is not built through promises, but through what holds up in practice.
What I can tell you is this: YearChapter was built by people who are parents themselves. Who have experienced firsthand how quickly a year goes by, and how little remains if you do not capture it. Who understand from their own experience what it feels like to want to access something you have made.
The choice to keep memories accessible at all times, to never place them behind a wall, to never hand them over to an acquiring party, that choice is not something we added later. It is built into how YearChapter is set up.
If you find yourself wondering what ultimately remains for your child, the article about what your child will have of you later goes further into that.
A memory you can no longer reach is no longer a memory. That is not what we want for you. And so we are building something where that simply cannot happen.
