Chat Hoarding App - A WhatsApp archive that outlives the phone
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WhatsApp ties your chats to a phone number you might lose. Chat Hoarding App decrypts your Android backup on your Mac, fully offline, and saves every message, voice note, photo, and receipt to a file you own forever. No cloud. No subscription. $99 once.
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Hey Product Hunt 👋
If you use WhatsApp on Android, you've probably seen this: "Google Drive is full. Backup failed." Your only options are pay Google forever, delete chats to fit, or watch the backup quietly stop working.
I got tired of renting space from Google to keep messages I already own. So I built Chat Hoarding.
🔐 Decrypts your WhatsApp backup locally on your Mac with your own 64-digit key. Nothing uploaded, ever.
📱 Three ways to pull the backup off Android: USB drag-drop, built-in adb, or the companion app.
🎙 Everything renders — voice notes, photos, videos, calls, locations, deleted messages, group history, per-recipient read receipts.
💾 Once it's on your Mac, it's yours. Drop the archive on an external drive, NAS, or wherever you keep things that matter. No Google Drive quota. No iCloud upsell. No phone number lock-in.
🛡 Only 2 network calls in the entire app: license check + update check. Your chats never leave your Mac.
People are using it to:
• Keep conversations with a parent or partner who passed away
• Preserve years of chats before switching phones or changing numbers
• Save group history before someone leaves or a number gets reassigned
• Keep a personal record before a number, account, or device is gone
🎁 Product Hunt launch: code PH40OFF → 40% off ($59 instead of $99). Ends Sat May 23 (48h).
$99 one-time. 2 Macs. Lifetime v1.x updates. 14-day refund.
Next on my list: iPhone source + a mobile chat viewer. Would love feedback on what to build after.
This solves a surprisingly emotional problem, not just a storage problem. Curious how you handle search inside large archives is it mainly chronological browsing, or can users quickly find old messages, media, and receipts across years of chats?
@dmitrii_volosatov Yeah, that's the part I keep underestimating. Storage is what gets people looking for a tool, but the real reason they stick around is a voice note from someone who's gone, or a chat with a kid that spans years.
On search: there's a search bar in the sidebar that searches across every chat at once and shows how many matches are in each one. Open a chat and there's a second search bar that jumps you through matches one by one. Works fast even on multi-year archives.
I still don't have smarter search that ranks the most relevant matches first, or filters like "only photos", "only from this person", or "in 2018". Those are the upgrades that I am still working on.
Photos, videos and voice notes also get saved as regular files inside the archive, so if you remember a filename you can just open the folder and look directly. I am also planning on having search across media files by doing OCR or Speech-to-text where possible, but those are planned further down the road.