Why Evrly's AI coach runs on your phone

Think about what actually goes into a shared goal. Not the tidy version you'd tell a colleague — the real one. How much you two earn and how much of it is left at the end of the month. Whether you want a child, and when. The health thing one of you hasn't told anyone about yet. Where you disagree about the next five years.

That's the text people type into a couples goal app. It's some of the most personal writing anyone does — and the moment you add an AI coach, you have to answer an uncomfortable question honestly: where does that text go?

Our default answer is: nowhere. It stays on your phone.

The easy version and the honest version

The easy way to build an AI feature in 2026 is to send the user's text to a big model somewhere in the cloud, get a clever answer back, and move on. It's cheap to build, it works on every device, and almost everyone does it.

It also means your goals — the money, the fertility plans, the disagreements — travel across the internet to a company you've never heard of, sit in a log file for a while, and rely on that company's promises about training and retention. For a goal like “save €6,000” that might be fine. For “get through this year without another burnout”, it isn't.

If a sentence would feel strange to say out loud in a café, it shouldn't quietly leave your phone either.

So we built the harder version. On the default tiers, Evrly's coach runs locally — using the AI model built into your phone, or a small model the app brings with it. Your draft is read, reviewed and answered on the device in your hand. It isn't uploaded, because there's nowhere to upload it to.

What that actually buys you

• No transfer, no third party. Text that never leaves the device can't be intercepted, logged by a provider, subpoenaed from one, or leaked in someone else's breach. The strongest privacy guarantee is the data you never send.
• Nothing to train on. Your goals can't end up in someone's training set if they never arrive there in the first place.
• It works on a train. Local means offline. Tunnels, planes, bad reception — the coach still answers.
• No meter running. Cloud AI costs money per request, which quietly pushes products toward upsells and usage caps. On-device inference costs us nothing per use, so we can leave it switched on.

What the coach does — and what it refuses to do

There's a second boundary that matters as much as the technical one: Evrly's AI does not write your goal.

You and your partner draft it yourselves — one SMART question at a time, and on shared goals you each answer “is this achievable?” and “is this relevant?” separately before comparing. Only then does the coach read what you wrote. It tightens vague wording, points at the fields that are still fuzzy, shows you warmly where your two answers pulled apart, and suggests a richer framework like WOOP when a goal calls for one. It suggests. You decide, and you can always keep your own words.

That isn't a limitation we're apologising for. A goal you didn't write isn't yours, and a goal that isn't yours doesn't survive month four. The conversation between the two of you is the valuable part. The AI's job is to sharpen it, not to have it for you.

The honest ladder

Which brings us to the part where a lot of privacy marketing gets slippery. Here's ours, in plain words:

Free

The full manual flow — draft goals together, split them into milestones and habits, track them side by side. No AI at all. Nothing to consent to.

AI Coach Basic

The on-device coach described above: review, hints, divergence, weekly recap. Your goal text stays on your phone. This is the tier the “nothing leaves your device” promise is about, and it's the one we designed the product around.

AI Coach Pro

An optional upgrade for people who want a larger model's depth. Here — and only here — a minimised version of your goal text leaves the device: the draft only, with the two of you pseudonymised as Partner A and Partner B. No names, no email addresses, no history. Turning Pro on is itself the explicit consent for that, it's off until you choose it, and switching it off returns you to the on-device coach.

And the part we won't round off: for the Pro tier we can't promise that the model runs inside the EU. Our current cloud provider doesn't guarantee an EU-only location for inference, so we say that instead of implying otherwise. It's one reason Pro is optional, consent-gated and clearly separated — and why moving it to a genuinely EU-hosted model is on our list.

Where it gets less magical

Building in public means saying the awkward parts too. On-device models are small. They're good at tightening a sentence and spotting a vague field; they are not a therapist, and they occasionally miss nuance a much larger model would catch. Not every phone can run one, either — where a device can't, the coach steps back gracefully and the manual flow carries on working exactly as before. A goal in Evrly never depends on AI being available.

We'd rather ship a coach that's a little more modest and entirely yours than one that's slightly cleverer and quietly reads over your shoulder. Your goals are yours. On the tiers most people will use, they never leave the two of you.