The question
Is there a journal app with no account and no subscription?
Yes, several, including one Apple gives you. Here is what each of them costs you and where they stop.
Why this is awkward
This category is unusually bad for it, and the reason is structural rather than anyone being greedy. People who journal do it every day and rarely stop, which makes them the most valuable subscriber a small app can have. So the good ones are subscriptions, and a fair number of the free ones are free because what you wrote is the product.
Which leaves people with the impression that the choice is pay monthly or be read. It isn't, and it is worth going through the honest options before reaching for anything of mine.
Apple's own Journal app comes with the phone, costs nothing, and keeps everything on the device. If it suits you it is the correct answer and one fewer app to trust. Where it stops is that it is built around suggestions from your day — photos, places, workouts — rather than questions you set yourself. There is no morning-and-evening structure, and you cannot add a field of your own.
Doing it yourself
The build-it-yourself answer is plain text, and it is a genuinely excellent one. A folder of Markdown files in iCloud Drive is private, free, syncs across your devices, and will still open in thirty years. Obsidian on top of that folder gives you Daily Notes and a template, so every morning opens a file with your own questions already in it.
This is the option that beats every app on longevity, and if what you want is to own the file, take it. It is what a plain text template looks like:
## Morning
What am I looking forward to?
What would make today good?
## Evening
What went well?
What is worth remembering?
Mood: /10
Sleep:What that costs you
- There is nothing to look at. Patterns in mood or sleep over a few months are the entire reason many people keep a journal, and getting a chart out of Markdown means installing and configuring Dataview and writing queries — which is a hobby, not a journal.
- You will retype what your devices already recorded. Sleep, steps and exercise minutes are sitting in Apple Health, and a text file cannot reach them.
- On a phone at eleven at night it is a text editor. That sounds like a small thing and is the reason most plain-text journals last about three weeks.
- Nothing locks it. The file is as private as the phone it is on, which is fine alone and less fine on a device someone else picks up.
- The blank page is real. A template fixes most of it, which is why the template above exists — but you have to write the template, and then remember to change it when the questions stop being the right ones.
Or the app that does it
Day and Night Journal is the same bargain as the text file, with the parts that make a text file quietly stop being used already built. Free to download and free to keep, no subscription, and no account with me — the only sign-in is Sign in with Apple, which is a lock on the journal rather than a way of counting you. There is no server behind it, because there is no server.
Every prompt is yours: add questions, remove them, reorder them, and choose how each is answered — notes, checklists, sliders, ratings, moods, a count, a photo of the day. Removing a prompt never erases history; past days keep the prompts they were written with. The Insights screen charts what you have been recording, and it can read sleep, steps and exercise minutes from Apple Health so you are not retyping them.
It syncs through your own private iCloud and nowhere else, which is also its limitation and worth saying plainly: there is no mechanism for sharing a journal with anyone, including me. Settings has a CSV export, because a journal you cannot get out of an app is not really yours, and a delete that genuinely deletes.