Refrain

Your Kindle highlights, back in your life.

You marked those passages because they mattered. Refrain brings a few of them back each day — seamlessly imported, beautifully set, and read entirely on your own devices.

Coming to the App Store · August 2026

Native on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch · Free download, one-time unlock

The daily deck in Refrain: a passage from Adventure: The Atari 2600, set in Literata, third of five for Thursday

The daily return

A few passages come back each day.

Every morning a short deck is waiting — about five passages, never a backlog. One you dog-eared opens the deck; a rediscovery from a book you haven't visited in months closes it. What you keep returning to, returns more.

No streaks, no scores, nothing to keep up with. Closer to morning coffee than to a workout app.

The best plans are the ones you can abandon cheaply. Everything else is a wager dressed as a roadmap.
An Elegant PuzzleWill Larson · Chapter 2

Your library

Import is plumbing. It just works.

Sign in to Amazon inside the app and Refrain reads your Kindle highlights straight from your notebook — your credentials go to Amazon and nowhere else. Older Kindle, or sideloaded books? Import My Clippings.txt from the device itself.

Sync as often as you like: the same highlight never lands twice, and your notes stay attached to their passages. Every book gets a cover, even the ones that never had one.

The Refrain Library: a shelf of generated book covers with highlight counts, sorted by recent

The unlock

Threads: the lines of thought running through your books.

Refrain reads your whole library on your device and finds where it rhymes — the same idea, marked years apart, in different authors' words. Those passages gather into threads: named honestly, kept if you choose, reviewable as a deck of their own.

Add your own insight to a thread and it stays on top, synced everywhere. Every count in the free app is true — you'll see how many threads run through your books before you pay a cent.

The Threads tab: 'Six threads run through your 68 books. Two you've kept.' — with The cost of complexity and Deciding without enough

Privacy

Nothing leaves your device.

There is no Refrain server and no Refrain account. Your library lives on your devices and syncs through your own iCloud. The finding — search, rhymes, threads — runs on your device's own silicon. It works on a plane.

One purchase. Yours.

Your own passages are never for sale — the free app is complete. The unlock buys what Refrain makes on top of them. Never a subscription.

Refrain

Free, forever — not a trial

  • Amazon notebook sync, uncapped
  • My Clippings.txt import
  • The daily return deck
  • Your shelf, books, and notes
  • Full-text search
  • iCloud sync across your devices

The unlock

$4.99, once

  • Threads across your books
  • Rhymes on every passage
  • Insights, kept and synced
  • Every future intelligence feature

Your library is waiting to be reread.

Free on the App Store this August, for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.

Coming to the App Store · August 2026