folk

folk is a companion built out of folkways: 62 prepackaged behaviours you switch on and it starts texting you today. A gym honesty mode that knows whether you actually went, a check on a message before you send it, a calorie tracker, one that keeps asking about the thing you keep not doing. It reaches you on iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp and Discord, and on the paid tiers it phones you.

Its privacy policy is written in lowercase plain English and is the most complete supplier disclosure in this directory. It names OpenAI and Anthropic models through OpenRouter, fal.ai for pictures, and then the part nobody else publishes: Langfuse, Lemma and Raindrop, the observability tools that record the messages folk exchanges with its models so the team can find slow or bad replies. Every product here uses something like that. This is the only one that says so.

The architecture claim is the second unusual thing. It says your data lives in your own private cloud computer, separate from everyone else's, with anything sensitive like the logins for connected apps encrypted, which is the same per-user machine design Meta shipped with Muse and nothing else here has claimed.

It answers the training question with a flat no, and prices from free at 20 messages a day up to $100 a month.

The dated copy of its site caught two edits overnight. On 10 September the footer on every page read "Backed by Y Combinator"; on 11 September that line is gone, and no other page on the site names an investor, so the funding row stays at not published rather than recording a backer the company itself has stopped stating. In the same edit the policy added TVMaze, Instagram and a web image search to the places folk looks when you build a character from an existing work.

Between 11 and 13 September 2026 the policy, still dated 8 September, gained a paragraph on connected Google apps: you can pick read-only access, so folk can see but never send, edit or delete, every connected account shows in settings what folk may do with it, and disconnecting one revokes access immediately. A read-only scope is the narrowest version of the delegated model recorded here, and the first policy in this directory to offer it as the user's choice.