Anyone keeping a personal record of important conversations
A chat you might need years from now
Workplace harassment. Custody dispute. A landlord refusing to admit what they promised. The conversation matters now, and it will matter even more later, long after the other side has blocked you.
Pain points
- Screenshots are trivial to forge. They don't carry the receipts, timestamps, or sender IDs that prove a message is real
- The other side can delete their account and the chat in your phone keeps working, until you switch phones
- WhatsApp's own export drops most of the metadata you'd want later
- Uploading sensitive chats to a third-party 'chat-to-PDF' service is itself a problem
How Chat Hoarding answers
- Source-level preservation: every field WhatsApp's database stored, kept as it was
- Read receipts and delivery timestamps survive the export, per-recipient in group chats
- Local-only: nothing uploaded to a third party, nothing in someone else's cloud
- Open .tarc format. Hand the file to a lawyer, an editor, or hold it yourself
Capabilities that matter for this use case
Decrypts the Crypt15 backup locally
AES-256-GCM decryption with your 64-digit key. msgstore.db.crypt15, the only database WhatsApp writes to the user-accessible backup folder. Keys never leave the Mac.
The whole conversation, not just the words
Voice notes, photos, videos, calls, locations, group history, and deletion markers with sender attribution.
Receipts on every message: sent, delivered, read, played
Three-state check indicator with timestamps. Per-recipient breakdown in group chats. Same icons WhatsApp uses.
Names instead of phone numbers
Auto-fills from your device address book (vCard exported by Chat Hoarding for Android, or pulled via adb), or manually per JID. Handles @lid privacy IDs.
.tarc, one file, lifetime archive
Bundles manifest, decrypted msgstore.db, an optional contacts.json (imported address book) and manual_contacts.json (your in-app renames), and the media folder, all inside a macOS package. Double-click to open. Survives the phone.
Two network calls. That's it.
Decryption, browsing, archive creation: fully on-device. Companion has no INTERNET permission. Chat Hoarding for Mac's only outbound calls are license activation and the update check.
Ready to archive yours?
$99 lifetime · 2 Macs · revocable from the account page · 14-day refund