Everything you're wondering.
Probably a few things you're not.

Patr is a Mac app that reads your iMessage conversations and makes them searchable, organized, and understandable. It creates a permanent local archive of your message history, lets you bookmark and tag individual messages, and can run AI analysis on any conversation to surface patterns in how you communicate.

Think of it as the app Apple would have built if they thought your messages were worth more than a search bar that works 60% of the time.

Patr is free to download and explore in demo mode. During the beta, you'll need an invite code to import your own messages. Pricing for the full product is coming — we'll just say this: we built Patr because everyone should have it, and we're pricing it like we mean that.

Join the waitlist and you'll be the first to know.

Your messages never leave your Mac. There's no cloud sync, no login, no account. Patr does have a lightweight server for things like invite codes and updates, but your message data never touches it.

The archive lives in a sandboxed local database — no other app on your Mac can access it. Even the AI analysis feature uses your own OpenAI API key. Your messages go directly from your Mac to OpenAI. Patr is not in the middle. We don't see your messages, we don't store your messages, and — no judgment — we really don't want to see them.

Privacy isn't a feature. It's the architecture.

Your iMessage conversations live in a database file called chat.db inside your Mac's Messages folder. Patr needs you to point it to that folder — once — so it can read your conversations and build your archive.

This is a standard macOS file picker. You select the folder, macOS remembers your choice, and Patr never asks again. Patr only reads — it never writes to, modifies, or deletes anything in your Messages folder.

So it can show "Mom" instead of "+14155555678." That's it. One-time permission. You can deny it and Patr still works — you'll just see phone numbers and email addresses instead of names. You can change your mind later in System Settings.

Short answer: Apple won't let us.

On your Mac, your iMessage history is stored in a local database file that apps can read (with your permission). On your iPhone, that same database is locked down. No third-party app can access it. Apple doesn't provide an API for it. This isn't something we can work around — it's a hard limitation of iOS.

Your Mac already has your full iMessage history if you have Messages enabled in iCloud. So if you use a Mac, you have everything you need. Patr reads it there.

If Apple ever opens up iMessage data access on iPhone, we'll be there on day one. We're not holding our breath.

Not yet. Windows support is on the roadmap. The technical challenge is that Apple stores message text in a proprietary format that requires macOS-native tools to decode properly. We're working on a solution that doesn't involve you shipping us your data.

The good news: if you have an iPhone and a Windows PC, your iPhone backups (made through iTunes or Finder) contain a copy of your message database. A future version of Patr for Windows will be able to read from those backups. We're on it.

Coming soon. WhatsApp Desktop on Mac stores messages in a local database that Patr can read using the same approach as iMessage — local file, your permission, no cloud, no export needed. It's confirmed working in our lab and it's the next major platform we're adding.

When it launches, your WhatsApp conversations will live alongside your iMessage conversations in the same archive. Same search, same bookmarks, same tags, same AI analysis. One app, all your messages.

Here's the honest breakdown:

Our priority is the platforms where your messages actually live on your computer. iMessage and WhatsApp cover the vast majority of personal messaging for Mac users. We'll expand from there.

Yes. Every conversation in your iMessage history — one-on-one, group chats, SMS threads — gets archived and is fully searchable. Yes, including that group chat you muted in 2023.

Absolutely. And sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn't find a message you know exists. And sometimes it takes 30 seconds to return results. And sometimes it finds the message but you have to scroll through two years of conversation to get to it because there's no date filter. And sometimes Spotlight decides to re-index and search stops working entirely for a day.

Apple's Messages search is fine for "did someone text me today." It is not fine for "what did my landlord say about the security deposit in August 2024." Patr is built for the second kind of question.

We're not saying Apple's search is bad. We're saying it wasn't built for the things you're actually trying to find.

You can try. Here's what that looks like:

We're not being glib. We actually built Patr because we went through exactly this process and decided nobody should have to do it again.

There are apps that do one-time exports of your messages to PDF or text files. They work. And then tomorrow you get 50 new messages and your export is out of date.

Patr isn't an export tool. It's a living archive. It stays in sync with your messages automatically. Every time you open the app, new messages are pulled in. Your archive is always current, always searchable, always growing. An export is a snapshot. Patr is a system.

You can. And let's be real — you probably already have. "What do you think this text means?" at 11 PM, pasting a screenshot into ChatGPT like it's your therapist's emergency line.

Patr automates that process. Select a conversation, pick a date range, hit Analyze. The AI reads the full thread — not a screenshot, not a cherry-picked excerpt, but every message in context — and gives you a structured breakdown of patterns, dynamics, and key moments. It saves the result. You can ask follow-up questions.

It's the same idea, except automated, structured, contextual, and it doesn't require you to screenshot 47 messages at midnight.

Permanence. Delete a message in iMessage and it's gone from Apple's database. Patr keeps it. Your history is yours forever.

Speed. Patr's archive is optimized for search and analysis. Searching 100,000 messages is instant. Apple's native search... isn't.

Independence. Your archive belongs to you, not to Apple's format. We can build features on top of it that Apple never will — cross-conversation search, relationship timelines, AI analysis, exportable memory books.

Less than you'd think. Text is tiny. 100,000 messages takes about 50–150 MB. That's smaller than a single episode of whatever you're binging. Photos and attachments stay in Apple's Messages folder — Patr just references them.

You'd have to try. The archive is a file on your Mac. Time Machine backs it up automatically. If you delete Patr, the archive stays in Application Support. You'd have to deliberately hunt it down and delete it. We made it hard to lose on purpose.

The message stays in Patr. The archive is write-once — messages are added but never removed. Patr doesn't propagate deletions. This is intentional. If you deleted something important by accident (or if someone else deleted something on purpose using iMessage's "undo send"), your archive still has it.

Your archive is the record. It doesn't forget just because someone wanted it to.

Yes. And let's be honest — you've been copying and pasting texts into ChatGPT for six weeks already trying to figure out what someone meant. This is that, except it's the full conversation in context, structured analysis instead of a wall of text, and you don't have to screenshot 47 messages at midnight.

Your messages go directly from your Mac to OpenAI's API using your own key. Patr is not in the middle. We don't see your messages, store your messages, or route your messages through any server. It's the most private architecture possible for AI-powered features.

An API key is a credential from OpenAI that lets Patr talk to their AI on your behalf. You create one at platform.openai.com — takes 30 seconds. Paste it into Patr's settings. Done.

Each analysis costs about 1–3 cents. Yes, cents. You're paying OpenAI directly for exactly what you use. No subscription, no markup from us.

Why your own key? Because it means we never handle your messages. They go straight from your Mac to OpenAI. We're not going to apologize for the 30-second setup — it's the reason your conversations stay between you and the AI you chose to share them with.

Absolutely. Search, bookmarks, tags, stats, date filtering, Apple Cash tracking, exports — all of that works without an API key. AI analysis is powerful, but it's optional. If you never add an API key, the AI features simply aren't there. No nag screens. No grayed-out buttons taunting you. They just don't exist until you're ready.

Say it out loud. Sounds like "pattern" — because your messages are full of them, and Patr finds them. It's also a backronym: Pattern And Trend Reporter. Did we come up with the name first and reverse-engineer the acronym? Yes. Are we proud of it? Also yes.

One person. A software engineer who needed to go back through a conversation and understand what actually happened. The tool didn't exist. So he built it. Then he realized everyone has a conversation they need to understand.

Patr is a product of Imagine Engine LLC, built in Tucson, Arizona.

Court-admissible forensic evidence? We're not attorneys and this isn't that. But here's the reality: the messages in your archive are the same data any attorney was going to subpoena anyway. We just make it searchable, filterable, taggable, and exportable as a clean timestamped PDF.

A good attorney will know exactly what to do with that. We give you the tool. They do the lawyering.