A crochet app without the subscription

Last updated 18 August 2026

Yarn Diary is free. Not free-tier — free. No subscription, no account, no ads, no features held back for a "pro" version. It tracks your projects, reads your patterns, checks your stitch counts and syncs between your devices, and none of that costs anything. Open it.

Why free is even possible

Most crochet apps charge a yearly subscription, and the honest reason is that they run servers: your projects live in their cloud, and clouds have bills. Yarn Diary is built the other way round. It is a set of static files — no database, no cloud of ours, no copy of your projects anywhere but with you. They live in your browser's storage on your device, and if you want them on two devices, sync goes through your own Google Drive. The infrastructure you'd be subscribing to pay for doesn't exist.

That architecture is also a privacy position: nobody can lose, sell or train on data they never receive. Patterns you scan are read by your browser, not by a recognition API on someone's server. The privacy page is short because there is genuinely little to disclose.

The subscription patterns it avoids

A few things crocheters run into with tracking apps, each a deliberate non-feature here:

Sync behind a paywall. The most popular row-counter app is free until you want your projects on a second device — then it's a yearly subscription. Yarn Diary syncs through your own Drive for nothing, because your data never touches our infrastructure in the first place.
Accounts you didn't want. Several popular platforms require signing up before you can track a single row. Yarn Diary has no account system at all.
Free tiers that nag. No upgrade banners, no "you've used your free pattern for today", no trial that flips to paid.
One platform only. Some of the best-regarded trackers are iOS-only. Yarn Diary runs in the browser, so the same app works on Android, iPhone, tablets and desktops — and installs like a native app from the browser menu.

What you give up

Honesty cuts both ways. Yarn Diary is not a pattern marketplace or a community — it won't replace Ravelry for finding patterns or showing off finished work. It has no chart-based tracking for colourwork grids, and there is no customer-support department behind it. It does one job — take a written pattern, turn it into trackable rounds with verified counts, and keep your progress safe on your own devices — and tries to do that job properly.

Where the safety net is

"Your device holds the data" raises a fair question: what if the device doesn't wake up one morning? Three answers. The app works offline and keeps working whatever happens to this website. Backups export to a single file you keep wherever you like. And with Drive sync on, every project sits in your Google Drive as readable files — nothing about your work is locked in, hostage to a company, or waiting on a subscription renewal.