About

Small words, every day.

Words Per Day is a quiet room for a daily writing habit. Pick a number of words, show up, and watch the line fill. That's the whole app.

How it works

• Tell it your name and a daily goal. It welcomes you and tracks your streak.
• Write in the blank page. The current line stays centred as you type, like a typewriter.
• Markdown is styled as you type (headings, bold, italic, lists and more), or turn it off. Print typesets it properly.
• An optional focus mode dims everything but the sentence or paragraph you're in.
• Your progress bar fills toward the goal. Hit it, and the day is yours.
• Export any day as Markdown or plain text, print it, download a full backup of everything, or share that backup from a phone.

Your words are yours

There is no database and no account. Everything (your writing, your name, your settings) is saved in the simplest setup only in this browser, using localStorage. Nothing is sent anywhere, because there's no server to send it to.

In Settings, you can download a backup any time, or sync to your own cloud (Dropbox, Google Drive, or a WebDAV host) so a copy stays safe and your writing follows you across devices. It can be end-to-end encrypted, your data is yours.

On a phone or tablet there's an even easier route: Share next to the download button hands that same backup file to your device's share feature, so you can email it to yourself, AirDrop it, or drop it into Notes or Files. Your device does the sending, so your words still never go anywhere near our server.

Install it, and it works offline

Installing is completely optional, and you can do it any time (or never). Words Per Day can be added as an app on a phone, tablet, or desktop. On iPhone and iPad use Share, then Add to Home Screen; on Chrome, Edge or a desktop you'll be offered an install button. On iPhone and iPad it has a real benefit beyond convenience: an installed app is exempt from Safari clearing its data after about a week unused, so it is the surest way to keep your writing safe there.

Either way, once you've opened it at least once it works fully offline: the page, your writing, autosave, export and print all work with no connection. Only the optional "who showed up today" counter needs the network, and the app is fine without it.

How long does it stay?

There's no expiry: your writing stays in this browser for as long as you keep using it on this device. Words Per Day also asks the browser to mark its storage as persistent, which helps protect it from being cleared when your device runs low on space.

One important exception, on Safari (iPhone, iPad, Mac): Apple's browser automatically deletes a site's local data after about seven days without a visit. So if you write in Safari and don't come back within a week, it can be erased. Two ways to avoid that: open the site at least weekly, or better still, use Add to Home Screen (Share, then Add to Home Screen), which exempts it from the seven-day rule. Either way, downloading a backup is the sure thing. Chrome, Edge and Firefox don't do this.

What it doesn't do

In the spirit of being straight with you:

• No sync. Because there's no server, your writing doesn't move between browsers or devices by itself. Moving it is deliberate: download a backup on one, restore it on the other (or Share it to yourself from a phone).
• One continuous page per book, not a document manager. Each book you create is a single running document with no folders, titles or file browser — only the word count resets each day, not the page itself.
• Clearing browser data erases it. "Clear site data", some privacy cleaners, and private/incognito windows will remove your writing. Keep a backup.
• It's a plain-text and Markdown space. No images, tables, or rich formatting in the editor. Markdown is styled as you type and typeset on print.

No analytics. No data. No ads. Ever.

There are no analytics: no page counters, no heatmaps, no "anonymous" telemetry, no third-party scripts, no fonts phoning home. We collect no data about you or your writing; there is nowhere for it to go and nothing that wants it. And there will be no advertising, ever: not a banner, not a "partner", not a single sponsored word. That's a permanent promise, not a phase before some later cash-in.

So we're deliberately a little blind. The only signal we ever get isn't a dashboard. It's the very real commitment of the people who show up, write their first words of the day, and choose to support the tool. That's the only feedback that counts here: participation instead of surveillance.

Make it yours

Behind the settings gear you'll find light and dark themes, a handful of self-hosted fonts (from calm proportional type to a real typewriter face), four text sizes, an optional paper texture behind your writing, the focus highlight, and a Markdown toggle with a small guide. Your choices are remembered on this device.

Accessibility

Words Per Day is built to be keyboard-navigable, screen-reader friendly, and to respect your reduced motion and colour-scheme preferences. If something gets in your way, let me know.

Free, kept alive by its people

It costs nothing to use. What keeps it hosted and maintained is people chipping in on Ko-fi, plus a quiet count on the support page of who else showed up to write today. No ads to sell, no data to trade: just the people who find it worth keeping. If there are increasing demands for more features I may consider them but the point is to keep this tool as simple as possible to solve the biggest hurdle in writing - sitting in front of that blank page and getting those first words of the day down.