The calling behind it
Cord started because of a plain observation: two people can share a house, a bank account and a calendar for years and still not know how the other one is actually doing. Not because anyone is hiding — because nobody asks in a way that gets an honest answer.
The purpose
A marriage does not usually fail on a big day. It thins out on ordinary ones — a week you meant to talk and did not, then another, until you are two people running the same household and no longer quite known by each other. Cord exists to interrupt that, gently, every seven days: one honest conversation, protected while it happens, between the two of you and nobody else. Everything else in the app — the prayer list, the chore rota, the budget, the calendar — is here because a marriage carries that weight too, and splitting it across five apps means neither of you is carrying it together.
You are not a user here, and your marriage is not a metric. There is no leaderboard, no score, no streak to shame you with, and no reason for us to want you in the app a second longer than the four minutes it asks for. We would rather be the least-used app on your phone and the reason you had the conversation. A good week in Cord is the week you close it early and go find each other.
The name
A splice is a knot that joins two lines so the join is stronger than either one alone. In the mark, two strands loop through each other once and carry on — and the place where they overlap holds a small heart. That is the idea in one drawing: love is the part of two people that exists only because they are tied.
“Though a man might prevail against him who is alone, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.”
Ecclesiastes 4:12 · World English Bible
What we believe
A belief that never changed a decision is not a belief, it is a slogan. So each of these is paired with the thing it forced us to build — or refuse to build.
So the loop is four minutes
Most marriage tools ask for an evening, a workbook, or a retreat. Those are good and they are also rare. Cord asks about six areas on a night you chose yourselves, because a habit you can keep on a tired Tuesday beats an intensive you do twice.
So the answers are sealed
If you can see your spouse said 8 before you answer, you will not write 5. You will write 7, and the week will look finer than it is. Cord shows neither of you anything until you have both finished — and it is never partially lifted, not for a preview, not for a nudge.
This is the one rule in the app we would not trade for any feature.
So a missed week says the opposite
Miss a week in most habit apps and you are shown a broken streak and a red mark. Miss a week in Cord and it says life happens — coming back is what builds the marriage. A broken daily streak gets fresh start today. The copy celebrates the marriage, never the app's own retention.
So the reveal is not a scorecard
The comparison screen says so in the first sentence. A gap between your answers is not a verdict on the marriage — it means you saw the week differently, which is exactly the thing worth talking about.
The same rule runs through Money: spending is drawn in navy, not red, because it is a fact and not an alarm. The insights are phrased as observations to talk over, never conclusions.
So it is encrypted before it ever leaves your phone
Your answers, prayers, journal, conflicts and finances are encrypted on your own device, under a key derived from your password and held nowhere but your phones. We operate the database and we cannot read a row of it. No analytics, no third party, and nothing we could hand over that would mean anything.
The trade is deliberate, and it has a cost: lose both your password and the recovery code you wrote down, and nobody — us included — can get your marriage back. How that works →
So circles are invite-only, with walls
A marriage that answers only to itself drifts. But a group is only safe if it is actually closed — so there is no browsing, no search, no discoverable rooms. The only way in is the code a leader hands you.
Inside, a circle has an everyone room plus a husbands' room and a wives' room, each readable only by its own side. One-to-one accountability threads are visible to exactly two people — not to the group, and not to your spouse, because their side has its own.
So it is quoted properly, or not at all
Every verse in Cord is public domain — the World English Bible or the King James — and always credited on screen. Reading plans ship as references only, never as verse text, so you read the translation you actually trust rather than the one an app picked for you.
Verses are set in a serif face, so a verse still reads like a verse and not like UI copy.
Privacy, concretely
"We respect your privacy" is something every app says. Here is the actual arrangement, so you can check it rather than trust it.
On your devices in the clear, and on our server only as ciphertext. Each row is sealed with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and bound to its own place, so a row cannot be moved or swapped without the seal breaking.
No analytics package and no crash reporter phoning home. We hold your account, your subscription state, and rows we cannot decrypt.
Email sign-in hashes your password on the device and never stores it as text. Apple and Google sign-in are used only for what they genuinely provide on-device — a verified identity — so you do not have to invent another password.
Your marriage key is wrapped twice — once under your password, once under a 100-bit recovery code shown once at setup. Both are locked boxes on our side. There is no password reset, because a reset we could perform is a door we could be compelled to open.
The privacy rules are not just intentions — the couple wall, the husbands' and wives' rooms, and the one-to-one threads are each covered by automated tests that run the real schema and assert that the wrong person gets nothing back.
The household vault is for where things are, not for the secrets themselves. The app says so in the interface, because a place to write down passwords is a place to leak them.
Who made it
Cord was written first for one marriage and the circle around it, and it still behaves that way: what you write stays yours, readable, whether you ever subscribe or not. If it is useful to yours, that is the whole point of a cord — it holds more than one thing.