Frequently asked questions

Brewlett is a private vault for your family's spoken memories. An elder talks, and Brewlett records them, writes down what they said in their own language, translates it if you want, and gathers it all into biographies, recipes, tales, and books you can keep. It is not a social network, and nothing you record is public.

Create an account, add the first storyteller - usually a parent or grandparent - and press record. You can sit beside them with one phone, or record on the web. There is nothing to install for the web version, and an iPhone app if you prefer.

Yes. The trial runs for 7 days and lets you add 1 storyteller and record up to 3 stories of 15 minutes each. No card is needed to start. It is meant to be enough to hear one real story from beginning to end and decide whether this belongs in your family.

They stay in your vault. Nothing is deleted when a trial ends, so if you subscribe weeks later every recording is exactly where you left it. If you would rather we removed everything, write to us and we will.

No. The person recording needs to press one button, and the storyteller only needs to talk. Everything after that - the transcript, the translation, the chapters - happens on its own.

Brewlett records, transcribes, and writes in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia, Urdu, Assamese, Thai, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Malay, Filipino, Swahili, Romanian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Czech, Hungarian, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Khmer, Lao, Burmese. Your storyteller speaks whichever language is most natural to them, and the transcript comes back in that same language rather than translated into English by default.

Each storyteller has their own primary language, so a Tamil-speaking grandmother and a Hindi-speaking grandfather can live in the same family vault.

Yes. Alongside the original transcript you can read an English translation, which is what makes these stories reachable for grandchildren who no longer speak the language fluently. The original is always kept as the record.

Up to 20 minutes on Memorybook and 30 minutes on Heirloom. Shorter is usually better: one memory per recording is far easier to revisit later than an hour of everything at once.

Memorybook allows 3 new stories per storyteller per day and Heirloom allows 10. There is no cap on how many you gather over the life of the vault - the daily limit only exists so a vault fills up at the pace of real conversation.

Names of villages, deities, and relatives are the hardest words for any transcription system, so expect to correct a few. Titles and details are yours to edit, and the audio is never overwritten - the recording of your elder's actual voice stays exactly as it was.

Yes. Some memories arrive as a note at midnight rather than a conversation, so written entries sit beside recorded ones and count the same way.

Up to 5 members on Memorybook and 20 on Heirloom, with 4 storytellers on Memorybook and 10 on Heirloom. Members are the relatives who listen and contribute; storytellers are the elders whose stories the vault is built around.

Send an invitation by email from the Family page. They accept, create their own sign-in, and land in the same vault. Nobody can find or join your family without an invitation.

Yes. Dream journal entries are private to you by default and only become visible to your family if you choose to share them. Everything else you add to the vault is meant to be shared with the members you invited.

That is precisely the situation Brewlett exists for, so a vault is never tied to one person's device or their access to it. Write to us at hello@brewlett.com and we will help the family keep the archive.

Brewlett reads the stories you have gathered for a storyteller and arranges them into chapters with a title, a foreword, and a contents page. You can preview the whole thing before deciding to buy anything, and regenerate it after adding new stories.

Not yet. Digital e-books are available today, and printed editions are coming once our print and delivery partner is in place. We would rather wait than post a book that arrives looking less than it should.

A biography is a long-form life story written from everything a storyteller has recorded, rather than a single memory. Memorybook includes 3 published biography runs per storyteller each year and Heirloom includes 5. Beyond that you can buy additional runs as you need them.

Yes, on every paid plan. You can export what you have added, because an archive you cannot take with you is not really yours.

Current prices for every plan are on the pricing page, shown in your local currency. Monthly and annual billing are both available, and annual is cheaper.

Families in India are billed in rupees, with GST included in the price shown - no tax is added at checkout. Everywhere else is billed in US dollars. If you already subscribe, your currency stays as it was, so travelling or using a VPN never changes what you pay.

Any time, from your billing settings. Your vault stays readable for the period you have already paid for. If you subscribed through the iPhone app, cancel in your Apple Account subscription settings, since Apple manages that billing.

Yes, in either direction, from your billing settings. If you move to a smaller plan, check the storyteller and member limits above first so you know what it holds.

A limited lifetime plan for the first 100 families, with no recurring bill and printed-book vouchers included. It is currently invitation-based - join the waitlist and we will be in touch.

The free trial exists so you can decide before paying anything. If something has gone genuinely wrong with a payment, write to hello@brewlett.com and we will sort it out. Purchases made in the iPhone app are refunded by Apple.

Only the members you invited to your vault. Recordings are not public, not searchable by anyone outside your family, and not shared with other families.

No. We do not sell your data, use it for advertising, or allow it to be used to train anyone's models. The privacy policy sets out exactly what we collect and which providers process it on our behalf.

Yes to both. You can remove an individual story, and you can ask for your whole account and its contents to be deleted. Deletion means deletion, not hiding.

In managed cloud infrastructure with encrypted storage, reached only through your authenticated session. The privacy policy names the providers involved.

Any modern browser on a phone, tablet, or computer, including Android, and there is an iPhone app if you prefer a native one.

With Google, with Apple, or with an email address and password. All three reach the same vault, so you can record on a phone and read on a laptop.

Write to hello@brewlett.com and tell us what you were doing and what happened. A person reads every message. If a recording failed, please do not delete it - it is usually recoverable.