FAQ

Sow is free to use, and the parts you use every day stay free. Here's the comparison:

• Free: Unlimited standalone devotionals, Bible reading across multiple translations, unlimited audio narration of Bible chapters, journaling, sermon notes, voice prayer recording, verse highlighting, widgets, iCloud sync across all your Apple devices, backup export and restore, one group of up to 5 members, 3 Ask Sow messages per week, one set of journal insights, and one guided reading plan from our built-in library.
• Sow Plus: Everything in Free, plus 30 Ask Sow messages per day, the full reading plan library and custom plans you build yourself, more groups with up to 12 members each, your own photo for a group mosaic, journal paper backgrounds, and insights you can refresh as you keep writing (up to 10 refreshes a day).

Sow Plus comes in two billing periods: $7.99 per month or $39.99 per year. Both unlock exactly the same features — the annual plan just works out cheaper per month. There is no lifetime purchase. Those are U.S. prices; the App Store sets the local price and currency for your region, and the app always shows the exact amount before you confirm. Sow Plus is not shared through Family Sharing — each person subscribes for their own Apple ID.

The annual plan includes a one-week free trial if you have not used a Sow Plus introductory offer before. Nothing is charged during the trial, and cancelling any time before it ends means you are not charged at all. The free tier stays open-ended either way — you are never required to start a trial to keep using Sow.

No. Reading the Bible, listening, reading plans, streaks, widgets, reminders, and all of your journaling work without one — Sow never asks you to sign in for them.

You only need an account for the features that involve our servers or other people: Ask Sow, Insights, and Groups. Sow asks you to sign in with Apple or Google when you open one of them, or you can sign in any time from Profile. Your journal lives in your iCloud either way, so signing in later does not move or change anything you have already written.

If you subscribe to Sow Plus before creating an account, Plus works right away — the subscription belongs to your Apple ID — and it is linked to your account when you sign in.

Your first guided plan is on us. Free accounts can pick any one plan from the built-in library and read it all the way through. After that plan is finished, starting another guided plan — including re-reading the same one — requires Sow Plus.

This only applies to guided plans. Standalone daily devotionals, Bible reading, journaling, sermon notes, and reading along with a group are never limited, and you can always resume a plan you have already started.

Yes. Open any chapter in the Bible tab — or the Passage step of a devotional — and tap Listen. Sow reads the chapter aloud and highlights the verse being spoken as it goes, so you can follow along or just listen. Playback keeps going when you lock your phone or switch apps, and the Lock Screen controls work like any other audio app.

Listening is free and unlimited — there is no weekly cap and it is not a Sow Plus feature. Narration is available for most of the translations in the app; if a translation does not have it yet, the Listen option simply will not appear.

The voice is synthetic — text-to-speech generated from the scripture text, not a recording by a narrator — so it will occasionally mispronounce a name. A chapter is generated once and then shared by everyone who listens to it, so the very first play of a chapter nobody has opened before can take a few extra seconds to start. Chapters you have listened to are cached on your phone, so replaying one does not use data again.

Ask Sow is a chat assistant that helps you explore Scripture. You can ask questions about the passage you're reading, request historical context, discover key themes, or find application ideas. It's available as an overlay in the Bible tab and during the Passage step of your devotional.

Verse references in Ask Sow's answers — and in your own journal entries — are tappable: tap one to read the verse without leaving the page.

Ask Sow is designed to be a helpful study companion, not a replacement for pastoral guidance, professional counseling, or crisis support. Free users get 3 messages per week; Sow Plus users get 30 per day.

Ask Sow needs an account, so your message allowance follows you. The first time you use it, we'll explain how it works and ask for your permission before it's enabled. See "What are Insights, and how do they work?" below for details on how your words are handled.

Insights surface the themes, prayers, and growth woven through your journal entries — like recurring topics you return to, prayers that were later answered, and how your reflections change over time. They appear on your home screen as gentle cards.

Insights need an account. Your first set is on us — every account, free or Plus, can generate one. After that, refreshing your insights as you keep writing requires Sow Plus, which allows up to 10 refreshes a day.

Insights, Ask Sow, Harvest, and journal page scanning are powered by trusted partners — OpenAI, and Google's Gemini for the monthly Harvest recap — that process text securely on our behalf. These features are off by default. The first time you use one, Sow explains exactly what will be shared and asks for your permission. You can turn them on or off anytime in the app under Profile → Privacy.

When enabled, only the text needed for each feature is sent — over an encrypted connection, never with your name or email attached. Your words are never used to train models, never sold, and never used for advertising. Your entries always stay on your device and in your personal iCloud; nothing is stored on our servers.

Groups let you read a Bible plan alongside friends or family and keep each other encouraged. As you and your group complete each day's reading, a shared mosaic image is gradually revealed together. You can see who has read today — their name gets a check — send encouragements, and share reflections if you choose to.

Groups need an account, since other people are involved. Every account can join groups for free. Free users can also create one group of up to 5 members. Sow Plus lets you create more groups and larger ones (up to 12 members each), and upload your own photo for the group's mosaic. Joining someone else's group is always free.

Because groups are a shared experience, some group data — your membership, display name, daily reading progress, any reflection you choose to share, and any mosaic photo you upload — is stored on our servers and visible to the other members of that group. Your personal journal entries always stay private on your device and in your iCloud.

You invite people with a link or code — a trysow.app/join address that works whether or not they have Sow installed. Anyone holding it sees a preview of the group (its name, who created it, how many members, and the plan) and can join, so send it only to people you want in the group. Messaging apps fetch that same preview to draw the link, and it stops working once the group is closed.

If your group uses your own photo for its mosaic, that photo is not part of the invite page or the link preview. Someone opening the invite in Sow sees only a blur of it; the actual picture is sent to members of the group and nobody else.

The group's leader can change its picture at any time from Group Settings, and the squares already revealed simply show the new picture. If the old picture was an uploaded photo, it is deleted from our servers as soon as it is replaced.

You can report any content or member from within the app, and you can block a member to hide their shared reflections and stop their notifications. Reports are reviewed within 24 hours.

Sow can send you a daily reading reminder at a time you choose, and — if you're in a group — notifications when members encourage or nudge you, when someone finishes the day's reading, and a short evening recap of how the group did. Notifications are optional: change them in Profile → Notifications, where member activity, celebrations, and nudges each have their own switch, or turn them off in iOS Settings at any time.

Larger groups do not buzz on every completion. In groups of six or more, the first person to finish the day's reading is announced right away; after that, completions are gathered up and sent at most once every three hours as a single "and three others finished today's reading" note — never between 10pm and 7am in the group's time zone, and never once everyone has finished, because the group celebration takes over at that point. Groups of five or fewer get each completion as it happens.

If you start the free trial, Sow can also send you one reminder before it ends, so the renewal is never a surprise. You choose whether to receive it, and whether it arrives two or three days ahead, on the screen that offers the trial. It is scheduled on your device — declining it changes nothing else about the trial.

Daily reminders and the trial reminder are scheduled on your device and work without an account. Group notifications come from our servers, so when you are signed in and allow notifications, Apple issues a device token that we store to deliver them. It's removed when you sign out or delete your account.

Yes. iCloud sync is available for all users — free and Plus. Your devotionals are automatically synced across all your Apple devices signed into the same iCloud account. This is your own private iCloud database; we have no access to it.

Profile → Support has both. Feature Requests opens our public feedback board, hosted by UserJot, where you can read what others have asked for, add your vote, and post your own idea. The board is public: anything you post there is visible to anyone who opens it, so please leave personal details out of it. Sow does not pass your account or email to the board — if you want to post rather than browse, you sign in on the board itself.

Report a Bug opens an email to us with your app and device version already filled in. You can also write to hello@trysow.app for anything at all.

Go to the paywall screen and tap "Restore" at the bottom, or, if you're signed in, Profile → Account → Restore Purchases. This will restore any previous purchases linked to your Apple ID — you don't need to be signed in to Sow.

Once a subscription is linked to a Sow account, it stays with that account. If you restore while signed in to a different Sow account, Sow will tell you the subscription belongs to another account and offer to switch — subscriptions can't be moved between accounts.

Open Settings on your iPhone, tap your name, then Subscriptions. Find Sow and tap Cancel Subscription. Your Plus features will remain active until the end of your current billing period.

If you are in the free trial, cancelling before the trial ends means you are never charged, and you keep Plus features until the trial period is over.

Nothing is deleted. Your devotional entries remain on your device and continue to sync via iCloud after cancellation — iCloud sync is free for all users. You keep read access to everything you've written. You will lose access to Plus-only features like expanded Ask Sow messages, the full plan library, larger groups, paper backgrounds, and insights. If you were part-way through a reading plan when your subscription lapsed, you can still resume it.

Yes. Go to the Profile tab and tap "Export All Data" under Privacy & Data. Sow creates a complete backup file — a Sow-Backup-<date>.zip (or a .json file if you exclude audio) containing your entries, attachments, and settings — which you can save anywhere you like.

You can restore that file later on any device from Profile → Import Backup. Importing merges the backup into your existing entries; nothing is overwritten and duplicates are skipped. If you need your data in a different format, contact us at hello@trysow.app.

To delete your account and everything we hold on our servers: go to the Profile tab, tap your name at the top to open Account, and tap Delete Account. This permanently removes your account record, sign-in sessions, subscription records, notification device tokens, group memberships, reading completions, shared reflections, and encouragements from our servers. It also deletes your journal — every entry, photo, and voice recording — from your device and from iCloud, so it is gone from all your devices. It cannot be undone. (If you have only ever used Sow signed out, there is no account on our servers to delete.)

A few things deliberately survive, because deleting them would harm someone else or let the deletion be used as a loophole: squares you drew into a group's mosaic stay in that group's picture but are no longer linked to you; if anyone had blocked you, that block stays in place; moderation reports are kept for our records with your identity stripped out; and the record that your account already used its one free set of insights is kept. If you created a group that still has members, it passes to the longest-standing member rather than disappearing from under them — a group where you were the last member is deleted with your account.

If you use Sow signed out, or want to remove data without deleting your account:

• Delete individual entries: Swipe to delete entries in the Journal tab within the app.
• Delete all local data: Uninstall the app from your device.
• Delete iCloud data: Go to Settings > [Your Name] > iCloud > Manage Storage, and remove Sow data.
• Revoke sign-in access: For Apple, go to Settings > [Your Name] > Sign-In & Security > Sign in with Apple. For Google, visit your Google Account security settings.

Consider exporting a backup first (see above) — deletion is permanent. If anything goes wrong, or you'd rather we handle the request, email hello@trysow.app and we'll respond within 30 days.

Only the ones a feature actually needs, and only when you use that feature. You can decline any of them and keep using the rest of the app:

• Microphone — to record voice prayers.
• Speech Recognition — to transcribe those prayers to text. This happens on your device; the audio is never sent to a cloud transcription service.
• Camera and Photos — to attach photos to entries, scan a handwritten journal page, or upload a group mosaic photo.
• Notifications — for daily reminders and group encouragements.

Profile → Privacy & Data has two independent controls:

• Insights & Ask Sow: Turns the AI-powered features (Insights, Ask Sow, Harvest, and journal page scanning) on or off. When off, none of your content is sent to OpenAI or Google. This is off by default until you enable it.
• Help Improve Sow: Controls anonymous usage analytics, including screen recordings of onboarding and the Sow Plus subscription screen. Toggling it off immediately stops all analytics collection. Your devotional content is never included in analytics or recordings.

No. Content sent through Insights, Ask Sow, Harvest, and page scanning is processed by OpenAI — or, for Harvest, by Google's paid Gemini API — only to generate your results. It is never used to train models, never sold, and never used for advertising. Requests are sent through our secure backend without your name or email attached, and your entries and chat conversations are not stored on our servers.

These features are off by default and only ever send your content after you've turned them on. Everything else — journaling, Bible reading, and your saved entries — stays on your device and in your personal iCloud, and is never sent anywhere for processing.

Bible audio is the one other place AI is involved, and it involves none of your data: chapters are narrated by Google's text-to-speech and timed to verses by OpenAI once, on our servers, from the scripture text alone. Listening sends nothing about you, and needs no permission.