THROWBAK
Your life has a story.
You’re the last to know it.
Throwbak is a life record system with an AI biographer built in. Desktop app. Local-first. Private by architecture.
v0.1 beta · macOS 14+ · Windows 11+ · Local-first · Free during beta
— LIVE SYNTHESIS EXAMPLE
— throwbak biographer · ERA-03 · 2017
WHAT THIS IS
Throwbak reads everything you’ve written and photographed, finds the connections you didn’t make, and speaks from the full arc of your life.
Not a chatbot. Not a summary.
A biographer — one that knows you better than any biographer ever could, because it has actually read everything.
Everyone wonders what their biographer would say.
Now you can find out.
You gave your whole group their collective memory.
You just never ended up in it.
Throwbak is the first product to have a word for what you are. And a way to find the photos of you that your friends have been holding without knowing it mattered.
THE OBLIGATORY DEBT
Somewhere on your phone are photos that belong to someone else.
They’ve never seen them.
Throwbak returns them. Not shares — returns.
The difference is the feeling.
Nobody does this well yet. The photos live in your camera roll, and the people in them have no idea they exist.
“You don’t send someone a photo of themselves because you were in a sharing mood. You send it because it belongs to them.”
YOUR PHOTO DEBT
you’re holding approximately
2,400
photos that belong to other people
One of you has the story.
One of you has the proof.
The gap between them is what neither of you can see alone.
same product · same download
THREE WAYS TO THINK WITH THROWBAK
LOCAL
100% on your machine.
Nothing you write ever leaves your device. Setup takes about 5 minutes and needs 8GB RAM. Quality is good — not quite as sharp as the hosted option, but completely private.
THROWBAK AI
The sharpest synthesis we can offer.
Runs on Claude — Anthropic's AI, chosen for their industry-leading privacy standards. Your journal text (never photos, never private entries) processes on their servers. Works on any hardware. No setup.
BYO KEY
Already have an API key?
Paste your Anthropic API key in Settings. Same privacy guarantees. Same quality. You pay Anthropic directly for what you use.
Shareable with anyone you choose
For named connections · default classification
Only you · never sent anywhere
Session unlock required · encrypted separately
Deliberate unlock only · we cannot read this
SEALED and VAULT entries are encrypted before they reach storage.
We are not capable of reading them.
That is not a policy. That is architecture.
→ Local-first by default — no cloud required
→ Open file format — your record works without us
→ Zero telemetry — we don’t know what you write
The people who could fill your gaps are aging.
The photos are on devices no one knows the password to.
The urgency compounds every year — not abstractly. Personally.
FROM THE FOUNDER
I have a best friend who died at 22. The photos of our time together live in other people’s cameras. I want to be able to read my own life back like a book. I built this because it didn’t exist, and I needed it before I needed it.
That is the only reason this product exists.
— David
What would your biographer say?
There is only one way to find out.
v0.1 beta · macOS 14+ · Windows 11+ · Local-first · Free during beta
Linux build coming · View roadmap · Source on GitHub