a private journal for the messages you write but never send. nothing leaves the phone. words fade in 4 seconds, then live in a small dark space — yours alone — until you choose to delete them.
onboarding is one screen. the lines fade in over five seconds, one at a time. there is no carousel, no permissions request, no account.
the only button reads begin. when you tap it, you are inside. you can never see this screen again.
your home is a yard. on the first day there is nothing in it — only a single italic line and a small + in the corner.
the upgrade pill in the top right is the only commercial gesture. it never raises its voice.
each tile is a small grave: a blurred avatar, a lowercase name, the platform you knew them on, and a quiet count of how many times you wrote.
the counter reads "4 of 5 ghosts" on the free tier — never red, never urgent, just a fact.
once a ghost has been quiet for three months, the app asks. it doesn't push, doesn't badge. it just appears the next time you open the door.
not yet dismisses. let go deletes everything you ever wrote to them, irreversibly.
the other person's bubbles never fill. they hover empty in the upper-left, dotted, suggestive — placeholders for words that will never come.
your bubbles are blue. there is no send button. you hold the bar above the keyboard for 1.5 seconds, then swipe up. the message lifts off and disintegrates.
if imagined reply is on, the app assembles a fictional response from word banks. it's clearly marked as imagined; the real person is never contacted, never aware, never involved.
after you swipe up, the bubble lifts away from the conversation, blurs, and breaks into ~140 cold-blue particles that drift upward and dissolve.
the animation cannot be skipped. you watch the words leave. a single word — gone. — replaces them.
the message is now permanently saved to that thread. but the ritual happens every time — every send is its own small ceremony.
creating a ghost is one form: a name, an optional photo (blurred forever), and the platform you knew them on.
imagined reply is opt-in and off by default. when off, no replies appear — true to the original promise. when on, the app assembles a fictional response from word banks: openers, fillers, hedges. the reply is clearly marked as imagined; never sent, never seen by the real person, never their words.
the first five ghosts are free. forever. for the sixth, the app asks for $9.99 — once, paid one time, kept forever. no subscription, no renewal. that is the only commercial moment in the product.
no ads, no upsell carousels, no urgency. one button, one price, one promise: nothing about your relationships is ever sold or syncs anywhere.
ghost is a private writing app. not therapy, not counseling, not a substitute for talking to someone who can help. if you're in crisis, please reach out — 988 (us) or findahelpline.com (global).
imagined replies are fictional. assembled locally from word banks and clearly labeled "imagined". the real person is never contacted, never aware, never involved. nothing is sent to anyone, ever.
your data stays on the phone. no servers, no analytics, no telemetry, no tracking. ghost cannot read what you wrote — there is no "ghost" reading on the other side, only your own device.
export is optional. save any thread to a still image kept in your photo library. ghost never auto-posts, never shares, never syncs. if a thread leaves the app, you put it there.