I built TimeStrands because timelines are one of the most information-dense ways to tell a story, yet every existing tool forces a bad trade-off. The mainstream options — Preceden, Tiki-Toki, time.graphics — are modern-dates-only, ad-heavy, and have no real provenance or API. The flexible ones — Notion, Airtable, Miro — render timelines as static graphics with no zoom, no lazy loading, and no source citations. And the spreadsheet/Gantt tools collapse past a few hundred items and never handle deep time at all. Nobody had solved the two genuinely hard problems in the space: rendering a native BCE/CE axis, and scaling a large dataset without shipping the whole thing to the browser. I already had a working engine that solved both of those — a viewer with a native BCE/CE time axis and viewport-tiled lazy loading with automatic sub-lane packing — but it was trapped inside a single-purpose history page. TimeStrands is the product turn: take that proven engine and make it a platform. Anyone can create a timeline, drag events into tracks, cite sources, publish it to a canonical indexable URL, and embed it anywhere with one script tag. Deep time is first-class rather than a bolt-on — a precision-agnostic signed-integer time model spans 10,000 BCE to today, and out to two billion years for geologic time, in a single column. Every fact can carry a source, and data is portable by design (JSON/CSV export), because lock-in shouldn't be a feature. The business model follows the same logic: public timelines are free forever, which makes them an SEO and viral distribution loop, while the paid surface is the genuinely hard stuff — private and PIN-protected timelines, collaboration, APIs, and large datasets. AI-assisted authoring lowers the cost of getting started ("give it a topic, get a proposed timeline"), and AI cost curves favor an indie SaaS. The defensible claim isn't any single feature — it's the combination: BCE-native dates, fuzzy precision, viewport tiling, per-event citations, and API/embeds from day one. Any one of those exists somewhere; the bundle doesn't.

TimeStrands

See how things connect over time.

See how things connect over time.