Why softPause never asks you to sign up
Open almost any calm app for the first time and you meet a wall: create an account, pick a goal, answer six questions about your sleep, see a paywall. Somewhere behind all of that is the thing you actually came for.
That sequence is a strange thing to put in front of someone who is already struggling. The moment you need a breath is the moment you have the least patience for a form.
So there is no form
softPause opens to a single button. No email, no password, no goal-setting, no questionnaire. If you want, you can tell it your first name — and that stays on your phone too.
What this actually means for your data
No account also means no server holding your history. Your pauses, your mood check-ins, your reminder times, and your plant all live in your device's local storage. They are not synced, not backed up to us, and not readable by us, because there is no “us” on the other end to read them.
Anonymous usage analytics exist to help improve the app, and they are off by default. If you never touch that setting, nothing is ever sent. If you turn them on and change your mind, Settings → Privacy turns them back off.
You can also erase everything at once from Settings → “Delete all my data”, or just uninstall the app — which does the same thing.
The trade-off, honestly
Local-only has a real cost: your history does not follow you to a new phone. We think that is the right side of the trade for an app whose whole job is twenty seconds long. You are not building an archive here. You are taking a breath.
The full details are in the privacy policy.