Why we built Macaco
Every app has a feature list. This one has a reason.
I've always journaled. Long before Macaco existed, I kept a physical notebook — one page per place, whatever I could remember scrawled in before the details faded. I travel a lot, and that book was how I held on to it: not a highlight reel for other people, just a private record for me.
At some point I wanted that same habit on my phone. Somewhere I could drop a photo, write a few lines, and — for the moments a photo doesn't capture — save a short video: the street musician, the waves, the toast at dinner.
What was already out there wasn't it
I looked around. There are plenty of travel apps. What I kept running into was the same trade-off: the moment an app added "social," it stopped being a journal and started being a performance — followers, public feeds, trips built to be shared rather than kept. That's a fine thing for some apps to be. It just isn't what I wanted for mine.
What I actually wanted was simpler than any of that: somewhere easy and straightforward to save my memories — safe, private, secure — with a real set of features, minus the noise. No feed. No audience. Just the record. (If you want the full breakdown of how that plays out against Polarsteps, FindPenguins and Day One, we wrote a whole comparison.)
Why "Macaco"
Macaco is Portuguese for monkey, and I've always liked monkeys — restless, curious, always somewhere new. It felt right for an app about travel.
There's a second layer to it, and it's the one we actually put in the app's own copy: macaco monkeys sometimes forget where they've left their bananas. You don't have to. That's the whole promise of the app in one line — hold on to what you'd otherwise lose.
The one feature I built for myself
The habit that shaped Macaco most directly is speech-to-text on entries. Writing by hand in that old notebook was part of the appeal — it was slower, more deliberate. But typing on a phone after a long day of travel is a different thing entirely; it's friction, and friction is exactly what makes a journaling habit die. So Macaco lets you talk instead of type. Tap the mic, describe the day the way you'd tell a friend, and it becomes your entry.
Try Macaco free
No ads, no feed, no credit card required to start.
