Ten miles past the trailhead, your bars are gone but your questions aren't.

No. Please don't. GumLeaf is a convenience, not a safety service, and texts can be slow, go missing, or come back wrong. If it's a real emergency, call your local emergency services (911 in the US, 112 in Europe) or use your phone's built-in Emergency SOS. Never bet your safety on a text bot.

Two ways. Text your question straight to the GumLeaf number, or drop your mobile number in the box at the top of this page and GumLeaf texts you first. Reply to that text and you're off.

Tap the upgrade link GumLeaf texts you, pay with Apple Pay, Google Pay, or a card, and that's it. Your number flips to Plus the moment checkout finishes, so just text your next question.

Yep. Send a note through the contact form from the email you paid with and I'll move it over.

5 answers a month, free, resetting on the 1st. We're capping the free plan at the first 500 members for now, so it's first come, first served. Each answer is one clear reply. Want more? Plus bumps you to 50 a month.

No - and that's on purpose. Every question is answered on its own and your conversation isn't stored, on any plan. There's no history to leak, subpoena, or train on. The one habit to build: include the place in each question, like "weather in Moab tomorrow" instead of "what about tomorrow?".

It does. iPhone Messages over satellite (iPhone 14 and up) and T-Mobile/Starlink direct-to-cell both reach GumLeaf as ordinary SMS. One tip: satellite texting is slow, so keep it short and give the reply a few minutes.

More than you'd think - but the catch is that some phones support it in hardware while the plan doesn't enable it. As of mid-2026 (this changes fast - check with your carrier):

Rule of thumb: if your phone can send a plain SMS to a normal number over satellite, it can reach GumLeaf - the satellite hop is entirely on your side.

Sometimes, but be careful: GumLeaf uses a US phone number, so texting it from a non-US SIM is an international text. Your carrier may charge its international-SMS rate (roughly $0.15-$1.25 per message depending on country and plan - usually not covered by "unlimited texts"), and delivery between foreign carriers and US numbers is best-effort and can silently fail. The supported region is the US & Canada. Traveling abroad with a US SIM is different: roaming texts back to US numbers are usually covered by your roaming plan.

Mostly you just text questions. The built-in commands: MENU (this list, by text) · BALANCE (answers left) · BART station / CALTRAIN stop (live train times) · REFER (invite a friend, bonus answers for both) · GIFT (gift 5 answers) · CONTACT (the contact card) · FEEDBACK your note (bug reports and feature wishes, straight to the maker) · STOP/HELP (opt out / help). Commands never use up your answers.

I like those too. Fullmoon and PocketPal both live on my phone. The thing is, even the most powerful model you can run fully offline is still pretty far behind the latest cloud models, and probably will be for a while. GumLeaf takes the other route: it sends your question out over a plain text message to a frontier model and brings the answer back. Both are worth having, so it's nice to have options.

As little as I can. Your phone number, a monthly usage count, and, on Plus, a link to your subscription. Your questions themselves aren't stored: each one goes to OpenAI to get answered, rides through Twilio like any text, and that's it. The full story is in the privacy policy.

Yes - text GIFT to the GumLeaf number and you'll get back a one-time code plus a share link (a little gift page). Forward either to your friend however you normally talk to them. When they text the code to GumLeaf, they unwrap 5 free answers. Notice what we don't do: we never ask you for their phone number, because nobody should get texts they didn't ask for. Your friend texts first, always.

Text STOP whenever you want. It's handled at the carrier level, so GumLeaf goes quiet for good, unless you text START to bring it back.

For sure. GumLeaf is open source (github.com/codestin/gumleaf), so you can run it on your own Twilio number and the LLM of your choice. What you'd pay me for isn't the code, it's everything around it: US carriers make you register a number for A2P texting, which is real paperwork and a wait of days to weeks; you'd hold your own keys and cover every message's cost; and someone has to keep it deployed and patched. On the hosted plan, that someone is me instead of you.

GumLeaf is what a koala lives on. In Australia, eucalyptus trees are called gum trees, and their leaves, gum leaves, are pretty much the only thing a koala ever eats. It gets nearly everything it needs, food and water both, from that one humble source. That's the whole idea. One simple, low-power channel, a plain text, is all it takes to keep you going off the grid. No app, no data plan, no Wi-Fi. Like a koala on a single gum leaf, GumLeaf does a lot with almost nothing, which is exactly why the koala is our mascot.

Yeah, it does. GumLeaf was inspired by peabrain, an SMS journaling tool my friend Buster Benson built back in the early 2000s. There's almost nothing left of it online now, just an old mailing list thread. What always stuck with me is that a plain text message is still the lowest-fidelity interface most people can reach, no smartphone needed. I wanted to bring back little tools like that.