Vinaa

Vinaa is a free, private browser for the chat history you export from ChatGPT and Claude. Both services will hand over your data as a ZIP file when you ask for it, but what's inside isn't built for reading, just raw conversation data and folders of attachments with no interface around any of it. Most people download the archive, glance at the contents, and let it sit in the downloads folder forever. Vinaa turns that file into something you can actually use. You open the ZIP on the page and get a clean reader where you can go through every conversation, search your entire history, and open the attachments that traveled with your chats.

The privacy posture is the whole point. Everything runs locally in your browser, so your conversations never leave your device. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is saved on a server, and the data clears when you close the archive. There's no account to create and no setup step at all. For people who use AI assistants for client work, drafts they'd rather keep quiet, or anything personal, that separation matters. You're reading your own export on your own machine, and the tool that renders it never sees a byte of it, which makes it a rare thing, a data portability tool that doesn't quietly become another place your data lives.

Using it takes three steps. You request your export from ChatGPT or Claude, open the resulting ZIP file in Vinaa, and browse. It works with the official export formats from both services, so there's no preprocessing, no conversion, and no fiddling with the raw files before your history becomes readable. Search runs across everything at once, which is the feature that makes a long history genuinely useful, since finding a half-remembered conversation from months back is exactly the moment a raw export fails you. Attachments open in place too, so a file you shared in a chat last spring is a click away instead of a scavenger hunt through nested folders.

The web version is deliberately ephemeral. It opens one export at a time, and everything clears when you close the tab. For people who want a permanent, organized home for their AI conversations, there's Vinaa for Mac, a native desktop app that keeps all your chats together. It imports your existing history from ChatGPT and Claude, lets you organize conversations into projects and folders, and then lets you keep those conversations going. You can connect cloud models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google using your own API keys, or run local models through Ollama and LM Studio, and you can switch models in the middle of a conversation. When you're picking a model, the app lays out capabilities, context windows, and pricing so you can compare.

The Mac app carries the same privacy stance as the web tool. Conversations are stored locally, sync is optional and goes through your own private iCloud account, and API keys are protected by the macOS Keychain. The developer states plainly that prompts, files, and responses aren't used to train AI models. It's a real native app, built with SwiftUI and AppKit, with Rust where it makes sense, rather than an Electron wrapper, and it runs on macOS 15 and later on both Intel and Apple silicon. Working conveniences round it out, multiple tabs for parallel conversations, an outline view for navigating long chats, reusable prompt templates with variables, file attachments, and tools you can adjust per conversation.

Vinaa fits anyone who has accumulated a serious chat history and wants it to stay useful. That covers people who lean on ChatGPT or Claude daily for work and regularly need to dig up something from a past session, people building a local archive that doesn't depend on a provider keeping old conversations accessible, and people switching assistants who don't want to abandon what they've already discussed. It also suits anyone who treats periodic exports as a backup habit, since each new archive becomes readable in seconds instead of joining a pile of unopened ZIP files. It's the work of Sujeevan Nagarajah, an independent Mac developer based in New Zealand, and it has the focused, single-purpose feel that indie Mac software tends to have.

Pricing splits cleanly in two. The web chat browser is free with no strings attached, no account, and no upsell standing between you and your export. Vinaa for Mac is a one-time purchase, listed at twenty dollars for lifetime access for the first hundred customers, and any AI usage inside the app is billed directly by the model provider through your own keys. There's no subscription and no middleman markup, which is consistent with an app whose whole pitch is that your data and your relationship with AI providers stay yours.