DiaryVault vs Small Hours
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
DiaryVault
This app acts as a private memory vault, allowing you to capture daily moments through photos, text, or voice notes. It uses AI to organize your life and help you find meaning in your past entries, even creating cinematic videos from your memories.
- Import photos, text, and voice notes
- AI-powered organization and meaning discovery
- Create cinematic memory videos
- Browse memories by time and chapters
- Share anonymized memory films
- Encrypted and private by design
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DiaryVault turns your memories into a living Constellation you can explore, rediscover, and share. Bring your photos, videos, notes, and voice recordings together in a private night sky. Keep the stories behind them and discover connections between the people, places, and moments of your life. DiaryVault is currently free. All features are included. EXPLORE YOUR MEMORY CONSTELLATION Find a memory through the details that matter to you. Explore by Time, People, Themes, or Places. Tap a star to open a Memory Card, follow a person through the years, or return to a place you haven’t thought about in a while. The same memories can tell different stories depending on how you explore them. CAPTURE BEFORE IT FADES A first smile. A familiar voice. Something funny someone said over dinner. Save a photo or video from your library, take a picture, record your voice, or write a quick note while the moment is still fresh. Not sure where to start? A Memory Spark offers a small prompt to help you notice something worth keeping. MAKE THE STORY YOURS Create one Memory Card or several at once, with progress shown for each card. Echo helps prepare a draft from what you captured. Edit the title and story, add or change keywords, and keep only the suggested connections that feel right. Save cards individually or save all ready cards together. Return to unfinished drafts through Memories in progress, or delete those you no longer want. You decide what becomes part of your Constellation. KEEP THEIR VOICE Sometimes the voice telling the story matters as much as the story itself. Preserve a voice recording alongside its Memory Card. Years later, you and your family can return not only to what happened, but to how it was remembered in someone’s own words. CAST AND GIFT Share a Memory Card using Cast, or gift a Memory Dot as a private keepsake copy in someone else’s DiaryVault sky. Your original remains yours. You choose what to share and who receives it. REFLECT WITH ECHO Ask about a person, place, or chapter of your life. Echo helps you explore the memories you have chosen to keep, notice recurring themes, and find connections you might have missed. AI suggestions are yours to review, edit, keep, or dismiss. REVISIT CHAPTERS OF YOUR LIFE Explore milestones, trips, relationships, and ordinary days through Eras and personal Memory Films. Return to the moments that made a season of your life what it was. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Your memories are private by default. You decide what is saved, shared, gifted, and deleted. Photo Library, Camera, and Microphone permissions are optional and requested when you use those features. Your Constellation belongs to you. Standard EULA: https://apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ Terms of Service: https://diaryvault.com/terms Privacy Policy: https://diaryvault.com/privacy
Small Hours
This app allows parents to create a shared digital journal of their child's early years, focusing on one photo per day. It enables private sharing of memories with family members and offers features like growth logs and video recaps.
- Daily photo journal
- Shared family journal
- Private memory sharing
- Growth and milestone tracking
- Video and photo recaps
- Secure iCloud storage
- Searchable memories
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Small Hours is a shared journal for your child's littlest years. It is built on the ritual of posting one photo a day. The limit is the point: a year later you have 365 pictures worth looking at, instead of four thousand you'll never scroll, sitting in your camera roll. Each day gets one photo, so every one counts. Around it add all the notes, milestones, songs, places, videos and voice notes you like. Every memory lands on both parents' phones. Each one arrives as an instant photo dropped onto a pile, captioned in real handwriting and dated with their age. The small hours are long. The little years are short. This app helps you keep them. THE FRIDGE Grandparents, aunts, uncles, godparents, and anyone else you choose get their own little app. It is called the Fridge, and you choose which memories go up. They see only those, held up by fridge magnets. All they can do is love them, so no commenting, no sharing links, just quiet little hears. When Nana hearts a photo it lands right back on your memory with a little burst. There is no account for her to make, she simply taps the link you share to join your Fridge. It works both ways. When your sister sends her family's Fridge link it opens inside your own journal. Her kids show up in your feed. Both journals stay separate. YOURS, AND ONLY YOURS There is no Small Hours server and there is no account to create. Your journal lives in your own iCloud, synced by the same Apple infrastructure that carries Photos and Notes. Everything is encrypted. Notes are end to end. With Advanced Data Protection your photos are too. No ads, tracking, or analytics. You are never locked in either. One tap exports the whole journal as a zip of full resolution files for you to download. ALSO IN THE BOX • A look-back every morning. This day one week, one month and one year ago • Month recaps that play like little films and export as real videos • A growth log with weight and height charts • Streaks, stats, and a photo a day nudge you can schedule or let surprise you • Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets • Face ID lock for quiet privacy • Search the whole journal. Notes, places, songs, people SMALL HOURS PLUS The journal is free. Photos, videos, notes, milestones, places, songs, scanning their artwork, sharing, the Fridge, search and export. None of it is capped. None of it will ever move behind a paywall. Plus adds the keepsakes. Memory Lane plays any day of the year as one story. The Soundtrack builds every song you saved into an Apple Music playlist. The Year Book lays out a whole year like a real book, ready to keep or print. The Artwork Book binds their drawings, each one framed under the title they gave it. Year in Review plays the year back as a little film. Then & Now sets the same little face side by side, months apart. Themes change the paper and the pens. Growth curves draw their measurements on the real WHO percentiles. $12.99 a year with the first week free, or $34.99 once. Family Sharing is included, so two parents never pay twice. Viewers, followers and grandparents never see a price at all. Small Hours requires an iCloud account. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Small Hours at none against DiaryVault's 4. DiaryVault's advantage is update cadence (daily vs every 3 days) and iOS requirement (15.0 vs 26.0). On price, rating, ratings volume and ads there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. DiaryVault sells 4 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month. Small Hours asks for nothing beyond the download.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for DiaryVault against 5.0 for Small Hours. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 1 and 1 respectively.
DiaryVault ships an update daily, Small Hours every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on September 9, 2026 and September 7, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | DiaryVault | Small Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) |
| Number of ratings | 1 | 1 |
| Update frequency | Daily — better | Every 3 days |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Freemium | Freemium |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 59 MB | 12 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | DiaryVault, Inc. | Hugh Gilmore |
Customer experience
DiaryVault
Small Hours
In-app purchases
DiaryVault
- Monthly Premium$4.991 Month
- DiaryVault Plus Monthly$9.991 Month
- Yearly Premium$39.991 Year
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- DiaryVault Plus Annual$89.991 Year
Small Hours
No in-app purchases





