What is RecallBase?

What RecallBase is

RecallBase is a small set of tools for saving, exporting, and organizing your AI conversations on your own machine.

The browser extension captures supported web chats whenever you decide to save or export them. The core workflow is simple: open a supported conversation, save it locally, and export only when you choose a destination.

That is really all it is. Not a chat client. Not a cloud archive. You can start without an account, and Pro/account features are only needed for billing and paid export behavior.

Why I started building it

I built RecallBase because I noticed something a little uncomfortable about my own workday: more than ninety percent of it is now spent talking to AI.

Some of it is in ChatGPT, some in Claude, some in Gemini, and some scattered across two browsers and three accounts because that is just how my work is set up.

The conversations themselves are great: full of decisions, half-finished drafts, debugging breakthroughs, and research notes. The problem is that ten minutes after I close the tab, I cannot reliably tell you where any of it lives.

I would catch myself opening four tools in a row trying to find the one thread where I had figured something out the day before, and it started to feel ridiculous. So I built the thing I wanted: one local place that quietly holds onto the conversations that matter, and lets me search across all of them without caring which platform they came from.

The problem it is trying to solve

The real problem is not really “AI conversations are hard to save.” It is that, as soon as you start using more than one AI tool seriously, your own thinking gets sharded across accounts, browsers, and platforms — and there is no shared entry point for any of it. Not for you, and increasingly not for the agents you ask to help.

RecallBase tries to be that entry point: a local archive you can search and export without first remembering which AI app held the thread. The kinds of questions I want to be able to answer in one shot:

1. 1

   What did I actually work on today?

2. 2

   Find that market research thread I had last week — I think it was in Claude.

3. 3

   Search my chats for anything about the onboarding copy.

4. 4

   Pull up the debugging session where I fixed the webhook bug.

How it fits into a normal day

The mental model is intentionally simple: capture on the way in, search on the way back.

While I am working, the browser extension sits quietly in the background and lets me save any supported chat with a click — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, whichever tool I happened to use that hour. Nothing leaves my machine unless I export it on purpose.

Later, when I want to look something up, I start from the saved browser archive or an exported file. Instead of re-explaining yesterday’s context, I can point myself or an assistant at the saved conversation that already contains the decision.

That is the whole loop. Save locally, export deliberately, and keep the important conversations somewhere you control.

The principles I am holding it to

A tool that sits this close to my actual thinking has to behave a certain way, or I would not trust it enough to use it.

So a few rules I am keeping non-negotiable:

1. 1

   Local-first by default — your conversations live on your device. The website only ever sees account and subscription state, never the chats themselves.

2. 2

   No ads, ever, and no selling data. Pro exists so the project can keep being maintained as AI apps change their UI every few weeks; it is not a funnel for something else.

3. 3

   Free has to stay genuinely useful — unlimited local saves and unlimited Markdown export are not going behind a paywall.

4. 4

   Independent and unaffiliated — RecallBase is not tied to any of the AI products it works with, and it never will be.

Where it is headed

I am keeping the roadmap deliberately short, because I would rather do two things well than promise five. Two directions I care about:

1. 1

   Be a first-class entry point for agents — the place a coding agent or assistant looks when it needs to know what you have already said, decided, or tried, without having to wire up a separate cloud account.

2. 2

   Stay a genuinely useful save-and-export tool for humans — capture a chat in one click, get a clean Markdown / PDF / Word / Notion / Obsidian / JSON / image export when you need it, and never lose access to anything you have already saved.