You have had hundreds of conversations with an AI. Somewhere in them is the explanation that finally made a thing click, the plan you talked yourself into, the shape of a problem you had been circling for weeks.

Now try to find one from March.

The problem is not search. It is ownership.

Your conversations live inside a product you do not control. If you switch providers, they do not come with you. If the service changes its retention policy, that is not your decision. If it shuts down, that is that.

Every provider will hand you an export — a .zip or a .json that is technically your data and practically unreadable. It sits in your downloads folder, and the part of your thinking that lives in it stays out of reach.

Mind Archive turns that export into something you can actually use, on your own computer.

What it does

Three things, done properly.

Import. Drop an export into a folder and it imports itself. ChatGPT and Claude are supported today, as .zip or raw .json. Each provider sits behind its own adapter, so support for one never destabilises another.

Search. Full-text search across everything, with the matching line shown in place so you can tell which result is the one you want without opening it. Tag what matters.

Keep. This is the part that makes the rest worth doing. Your archive is Markdown and JSON in an ordinary folder. Every conversation becomes one file, dated and titled:

data/archive/2026/chatgpt/2026-03-11-postgres-index-strategy.md

Open it in any editor. Grep it. Sync it. Put it in git. Delete Mind Archive tomorrow and every one of those files still opens, because they were never in a format that needed us.

It runs on your machine

No account. No sync. No telemetry. The interface runs at localhost:5173 and the API at localhost:8000, and neither is reachable from outside your computer.

Optional cloud backup exists, is off by default, and cannot be switched on without you doing it deliberately.

This is not a promise we are asking you to take on faith. It is a property of how the thing is built, and you can read the code to check.

Try it

git clone https://github.com/narainsagar/mindarchive.git
cd mindarchive
cp .env.example .env
python scripts/dev.py up --build

Then open http://localhost:5173. Getting your export out of ChatGPT is the slow part — it can take a few days, and the download link expires 24 hours after the email arrives, so ask once and wait.

Licensing

Mind Archive is proprietary software, all rights reserved. It is not open source and it is not source-available, and we are not going to describe it as either, because those words mean something specific.

Nothing is for sale yet and there is no price list. If that changes it will be announced here, not implied.

What none of it touches is your archive: Markdown and JSON on your own disk, exportable at any time, readable without this application. That is the part of the promise that does not depend on a licence. Start with what “local-first” actually means.