The long version. If you want it.
If you got this far, you probably want more than the summary. Here's the longer explanation of what Vitni does, why I built it the way I did, and what it costs you when the trade-offs come due.
Vitni is a private AI chat with an encrypted journal attached, built by one person in Oslo. In the chat you type the first thing that's true, and the AI asks the next question or repeats your thought back in different words so you can see it from outside your own head. It has no name, no persona, no character. When a conversation is worth keeping, the AI drafts a journal entry from it, and you edit and save. Or skip the chat and write one from scratch. Everything is encrypted on your device before it leaves, so the server holds locked boxes nobody at Vitni can open. The chat is the one exception: the message travels encrypted, but Anthropic has to read the words to answer, does not train on them, and deletes them under a standard retention window of up to 30 days. Lose both the passphrase and the recovery phrase and the writing is gone.
The chat. A tool, not a friend.
You open the chat. You type something. Anything. The first thing that's true.
The AI writes back. It doesn't tell you you're doing great. It doesn't say "that sounds hard." It doesn't have a name. It doesn't pretend to be your friend.
What it does is read what you wrote and ask you a question. Or it repeats your thought back to you in different words, so you can see it from outside your own head. The point is to help you figure out what you're actually thinking, even when you don't know.
It can feel like talking to a friend who doesn't judge. That's the experience. The AI itself isn't your friend. It has no character, no name, no backstory. The warmth comes from the structure, not from a persona.
Nothing you type trains the AI. To answer you, the message goes to the AI company (Anthropic, the people behind Claude) and gets read there in the clear. They don't train on it, and they delete it on their standard schedule rather than keeping it around. No name or email goes with it. I won't tell you it vanishes the instant they reply, because that isn't the deal. What ties a message to you is whatever you wrote, not a label Vitni attached.
How the journal works: the entry you'd never have written.
Therapists, psychologists, and the people who write about mental health are always talking about how good journaling is for you. They're not wrong. The problem is what actually happens when you try.
You open the notebook. You grab the pen. You feel like you're doing something good. Then you don't know what to write.
Or you do know what to write, but many of us are afraid of being judged. By ourselves. By anyone who might find it later. So you write something else, or nothing.
Or you do write. For two days. You feel like you've started something. Then you forget. Or stop. Three weeks later you remember the notebook and feel worse than if you'd never started.
Vitni handles the part where you don't know what to write. You have a chat first, the way you'd text someone. The AI helps you figure out what's actually on your mind. When you're ready, you save the chat as a journal entry. The AI drafts it from the conversation. You edit. You save. Or you skip the chat and write a fresh entry from scratch, like a regular diary.
You can read your entries later, change them, or delete them. You can export everything to a file on your computer whenever you want. They're yours, encrypted on your device before they leave it.
Why nobody at Vitni can read what you write: it's locked on your phone before it goes anywhere.
Picture writing a letter, putting it in a locked box, and being the only person with a key. That's what happens every time you type something into Vitni. Your phone scrambles the words first. The locked box gets sent to a server. The server holds it. Nobody can open it but you.
If someone hacked into the Vitni servers tomorrow, they would not get to read a single thing you wrote. They would just get a pile of locked boxes they can't open.
I cannot read your stuff. Not because I promise not to. Because the app is built so I can't. There's no master key. There's no admin panel where I can peek. There's no "we may use anonymized" loophole. I built myself out of the room on purpose.
The trade-off, said plainly: your account password lets you sign in, but it's the passphrase that unlocks what you wrote, and only you have that. If you forget the passphrase and lose your recovery code, the writing is gone. There's no reset for the writing itself. That is the cost of being the only person who can read it. Pick a passphrase you won't lose, and save the recovery code somewhere safe.
The chat works a little differently. When you talk to the AI, the message has to leave your phone so the AI can read it and write back. It travels encrypted, but the AI has to see the actual words to answer, so for that moment they aren't secret from the AI company. That company, Anthropic, doesn't train on what you write, and deletes it on their standard schedule. No name or email is attached to the request. The Vitni server does keep your chat, but only as locked boxes it can't open, the same as your journal, so you can come back to a conversation later. Nobody at Vitni can read it, and it stays until you delete your account.
If you want the whole architecture, it's public. Every box, every arrow. Read the deep overview
Not yet. Not ever.
The encryption code isn't public yet. Everything on this page about how your writing is locked is, for now, something you take on trust from one person in Oslo. For a product whose whole argument is privacy, that's the wrong way round, and it's the next thing to fix. Pricing is the other gap. Vitni is free in the beta and won't stay free at every level: free at the core, paid for what scales, never ads, and nothing you write is ever sold. We name these here so you know what's shipped and what isn't.
Then there are things that will never be here. Vitni isn't therapy. It isn't a crisis tool. It isn't a friend. It isn't a fix. It's a place to think out loud with a tool that refuses to perform care.
If you're in crisis right now, please reach out to someone trained for it.
That's the whole story. Want to try it?
Vitni is in public beta. Read about what that means, then an email gets you in.