My AI conversations were scattered across three apps that couldn't remember each other. So I built a private, local-first vault that pulls them together and lets me hand my whole history to any new model. Come break it and tell me what's missing.
Picture this. You spend an hour with ChatGPT untangling a gnarly bug. It's beautiful. You feel understood.
Two weeks later you need that exact solution again. You open ChatGPT and... which of your 300 conversations was it? Was it even ChatGPT? Maybe it was Claude. Or that one Gemini chat you'll never find because it's titled "Untitled."
And here's the part that finally broke me: even when you do find it, the new model you're chatting with today has no idea any of it ever happened. Every AI lives in its own little walled garden with the long-term memory of a goldfish. Switch tools and you start from zero.
So I did the reasonable, well-adjusted thing and built an app about it.
ChatVault is a private home for your AI chat history. You export your conversations from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini (they all offer this), drop the file in, and suddenly everything lives in one place you can actually search.
That alone scratched my itch. But then I added the feature I can't shut up about.
There's a button called Export as memory.
You pick a bunch of conversations or a whole collection and ChatVault bundles them into a single tidy file with a little instruction note at the top: "Treat the following as background knowledge about me and my projects." Paste that into a fresh ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini chat, and the new model starts the conversation already knowing your context.
It's like handing the new hire a binder of everything the last one learned, instead of making them figure out who you are from scratch every single morning.
It even trims the fat if you want, strips code blocks, condenses long-winded replies, and shows you a live token estimate so your "memory" actually fits in the model's context window. And because it pulls in the private notes you jot on each chat, the AI gets your curated takeaways, not just a raw transcript wall.
Here's the thing I'm weirdly proud of: nothing leaves your device. No account. No server. No analytics. No "we value your privacy" popup that means the opposite. Your conversations sit in your own browser and never phone home, ChatVault makes zero network requests, and you can watch the Network tab to prove it.
That's not just a nice-to-have. It's why it can stay free. There's no server bill to pass on to you, because there's no server. Turns out the cheapest backend is no backend.
I built this on nights and weekends, which means it works great on my machine and I would love to know how spectacularly it breaks on yours. Especially:
Kick the tires, be brutal, tell me everything. And I'm genuinely curious in the comments: what's the one AI conversation you wish you could pull back up right now and which model would you hand your memory file to first?