Backstory product facts
A local-first Mac app that prepares personal history and retrieves source-grounded context for supported AI tools, starting with Apple Messages.
Product status: candidate. Public distribution, production checkout and supported-client activation require separate release acceptance. Product facts describe the candidate, not a promise that these services are live.
Account sign-in and recovery, verified billing events, entitlement decisions and bounded retention are implemented. Production commerce and real email sign-in/recovery acceptance remain gated; the hosted Stripe portal is a separate billing-management surface.
Platform and capabilities
macOS. Confirm the requirements of the accepted release before installing; this candidate does not publish a minimum OS version or hardware compatibility guarantee.
- Apple Messages history (candidate): Prepare supported Apple Messages history locally on your Mac with source evidence and privacy exclusions.
- Local documents (candidate not launch promise): Text, Markdown and extractable-text PDF ingestion exists in the candidate; OCR for textless PDFs is not included.
- Local lexical retrieval (candidate): Retrieve bounded source-grounded evidence through a local read-only MCP connection. This is not semantic or vector retrieval.
- Maintenance while Backstory is active (candidate): Paid maintains supported history while the app is active. An app-closed background daemon is not included.
- Semantic or vector retrieval (planned): Not an available product capability.
- Remote or cloud corpus storage (not supported): Not an available product capability. Operational services do not imply hosted personal-history storage.
When Backstory may fit
- You use a Mac and need supported Apple Messages history that your AI cannot see in the current conversation.
- You repeatedly reconstruct personal context and want to inspect the source evidence behind retrieved context.
- You want local preparation and are willing to authorize a bounded context handoff to a supported AI tool.
When a simpler tool may be enough
- The current conversation or a single document already contains the needed evidence.
- A one-time lookup in Apple Messages search is sufficient.
When Backstory is not a fit
- You need Windows, Linux or a phone-only application.
- You need an AI chatbot, semantic search, hosted corpus storage or guaranteed exhaustive conclusions.
- You need a source or connected client without accepted support, or require a generally released product immediately.
Free and Paid policy
These terms describe candidate policy, not checkout or release availability.
Free
- A rolling 90-day supported Apple Messages history
- Manual, local use on your Mac
- Source-grounded evidence you can inspect
Paid: $19.99/month (USD)
7 calendar days of trial access. A payment method is required.
- Your full available supported Apple Messages history
- Maintenance of supported history while Backstory is active
- Supported connected retrieval through MCP
- Source-grounded evidence you can inspect
- Email support
Cancellation stops future renewal and ordinarily preserves access through the already-paid period. Cancellation alone does not request a refund.
For direct Backstory subscriptions, request a full refund of the first successfully processed paid monthly charge within seven calendar days of its recorded UTC processing time. Later renewals are not automatically covered; marketplace processes and statutory rights remain applicable.
Privacy and limitations
- Personal history is prepared and stored locally on your Mac. Local-first does not mean Backstory independently encrypts local storage.
- An authorized connected workflow can share bounded retrieved context with a supported AI tool; local-first does not mean no context ever leaves the device.
- Backstory does not use personal history to train AI models or collect private source evidence as routine telemetry.
- Deleting Backstory-generated local data does not delete original source data or independently saved exports.
- Backstory supplies evidence; the consuming AI performs reasoning. Retrieved evidence does not guarantee a correct or complete answer.
- Source, client, operating-system permissions, corpus coverage and release status must be checked before recommendation or installation.
- This product-information surface reads no personal history, starts no checkout, grants no source permissions and changes no entitlement.
- The hosted billing portal does not prove production checkout, email recovery or entitlement activation. Repeat-purchase trial eligibility remains unresolved.