Launched this week
There's no shortage of AI tools that summarise content. Gistr does something different - it's built for understanding. Save a YouTube video, podcast, article, or PDF. Gistr extracts what matters, grounds every insight in the source, and gives you an editable outline to think with - not just read from. Add your own ideas, connect multiple sources, and verify every claim. If you consume a lot and retain very little - Gistr was built for you.
The “saving felt like understanding” line lands. That’s exactly where most read-it-later and summary tools break for me: they reduce the backlog, but they don’t preserve the user’s actual thinking.
One workflow I’d want is a clean distinction between source claims, AI outline, and my own interpretation/questions. If I edit the outline into my take, I’d want Gistr to remember “this is Jim’s synthesis” vs. “this was in the source,” so future AI help doesn’t flatten it back into a generic summary.
@jim_jeffers Thanks, Jim. You're highlighting exactly the issue we often consider internally. Currently, Gistr keeps your edits and annotations separate from the source material, but we haven’t yet developed the layer you’re referring to: a way to make this distinction clear to the AI so it doesn’t revert your insights back to the original source when you ask follow-up questions. This feature is on our roadmap.
We envision treating user edits as a separate “layer” with higher authority than the generated outline, so the AI relies on your synthesis instead of overwriting it. It's early days, but your framing is spot-on, and it’s helpful to hear this from someone who has already encountered this challenge with other tools.
@arunfromgistr Yes — “user edits as a separate layer with higher authority” is exactly the thing. If you want a lightweight test case, I’d try one source where a user disagrees with the outline: source claim → AI outline → user synthesis/question. Then ask Gistr a follow-up and see whether it preserves the disagreement instead of smoothing it back into the source summary.
Congrats on the launch team Gistr. Tried Gistr a couple weeks ago and the thing that surprised me was how fast the source got processed. Dropped in a 45-minute podcast expecting to wait, came back one minute later and the highlights were ready. Small detail but the speed of that step is what made me actually keep using it rather than closing the tab and forgetting.
Thanks a lot, @sreehari_raveendran! Really glad that stood out to you. We spent a lot of time optimizing processing speed because we felt that exact moment — waiting too long and losing momentum — breaks the learning flow. Hearing that it actually made you keep using Gistr means a lot to us 🙌
@sreehari_raveendran Appreciate that a lot 🙌 That “come back in a minute and it’s ready” feeling was something we obsessed over while building Gistr. Really glad it made the experience stick for you.
@sreehari_raveendran Thanks Sreehari! That processing speed was a deliberate bet - we noticed that even a 30-second wait was enough for people to context-switch and never come back. Glad it landed the way we intended.
Hey Product Hunt 👋 - Arun here, founder of Gistr.
I used to screenshot content, save articles, and bookmark videos, convinced that future myself would handle it. But future me never did. Eventually, I stopped pretending the current system worked and began creating a different one.
The issue wasn't that I was saving the wrong things; it was that saving felt like understanding, which isn't the case.
Gistr aims to bridge that gap. It's not about quicker summaries of what you consume—it's a method to genuinely make sense of the sources you gather.
So we built it as a thinking companion, not a notebook or a summariser:
📥 Save and consume anything - YouTube, podcasts(Apple & Spotify), PDFs, articles, EPub, MOBI, PPTx, etc - via web, mobile, or browser extension
🎙️ Take notes your way - type, highlight, or record a voice note directly on any source. Your thinking lives next to the content that sparked it
💫 AI-generated outlines that you can customize and develop your own ideas from.
📍 Every AI response is grounded in your sources with citations you can verify.
🌳 A living knowledge base that gets sharper about you the more you use it (the part we're most excited about)
Who it's for: Lifelong Learners, Researchers, Curators, Content Creators, PMs, founders, and serious learners who consume a lot and want it to compound into real expertise - not a graveyard of saved URLs.
We're at 20,000+ users across 100+ countries, grown entirely through word of mouth. Today, we're bringing it to the PH community.
The free tier gives you the full experience. Explorer and Thinker tiers for power users, plus credit passes if you want to go deep on a project without committing.
Launch-day offer: 35% off the Explorer and Thinker tiers for the next few days. No code needed - discount applied at checkout.
I'll be here all day. Roast it, question it, tell me what sucks.
Most curious to hear: what's your current system for actually retaining what you read or watch? Mine was "hope" — which is how I ended up building this.
— Arun
This line is the whole thing for me too: "saving felt like understanding."
I watched @arun_antony4 describe this exact feeling probably a hundred times in early conversations before we started building.
Every time someone said it back, it felt like we'd named something they'd been carrying around without words for it.
That recognition moment is still the most validating thing about working on Gistr 🙌
mailX by mailwarm
Do you keep the original transcripts and PDFs searchable offline, or is it all cloud based?
@naimz it's currently cloud based. Thanks for your question.
@naimz Right now it’s fully cloud-based. Offline access is something we’ve been discussing internally - it’s on our radar but not the immediate focus. We want to get the core experience right for more users first before expanding there. Appreciate the question though, good to know there’s interest.
Congrats on the launch @arunfromgistr 🎉 I keep hearing nothing but good things about Gistr. A couple of my cousins are med students and they've worked it right into their daily routine, and the PMs I work with are big fans too. Excited to see where you take this.
@gibin_michael This is incredibly motivating to hear ❤️
Knowing that people are actually making Gistr part of their daily learning and work routines is exactly what we hoped for while building this. Hearing that med students and PMs are finding value in it makes it even more special. Really appreciate you sharing this, Gibin 🚀
@gibin_michael Thanks so much, Gibin! Really cool to hear your cousins are using it for med school. And love that it’s clicking with PMs too. Means a lot to have people organically working it into their flow. Appreciate the support! 🙌
@gibin_michael Really appreciate this, Gibin 🙌. Thanks a ton for the support!
One thing we kept noticing while building Gistr — learning online is weirdly fragmented.
PDFs are in one app, PPTs somewhere else, YouTube videos across 15 tabs, notes in another tool, and research chats sitting separately in ChatGPT.
Gistr is our attempt at making all of that feel a lot more effortless. Your sources, notes, highlights, voice thoughts, and AI conversations all stay connected in one place instead of being scattered everywhere.
Would love to know if others here feel the same chaos while learning/researching online.
@farhan_m_jeejo yes, this is exactly the problem we kept running into, and you’ve articulated it really well here.
And honestly, a big part of why we’ve been able to move so quickly to solve it is because of people like you. In just about a month of joining the team, you’ve shipped new features with a speed and precision that’s rare to see. The kind of ownership you’ve brought from day one has genuinely accelerated what we’re building.
Really grateful to have you on the team and excited for the PH community to see what’s next from us 🙌
@farhan_m_jeejo Farhaan 🚀
You’ve been able to take a problem that feels chaotic and make it feel surprisingly seamless in the product — and that’s such a huge part of what people are resonating with in Gistr right now.
The speed and ownership you’ve brought to the team has honestly been incredible to watch. So many of the connected experiences people are enjoying today exist because you moved fast and cared deeply about getting the details right. Super grateful to be building this with you ❤️
Really excited to finally share Gistr with the Product Hunt community
Would genuinely love your feedback, questions, and even critiques. We’ll be around all day 👀
@itsrakesh, I couldn’t agree more. And honestly, having you on the team this past month has been a big reason we’re launch-ready today. The speed at which you’ve picked things up and shipped features has been impressive.
Grateful to be building this together 🙌
@itsrakesh Bro came in and started shipping like he’d been building Gistr for months 😭
A lot of the smoothness people are experiencing today is because of the frontend care you brought in so quickly. Launch day feels extra special seeing all of that live now 🚀