How it works: (1) Optionally import your existing saved web browsing through one of our integrations or through a URL CSV import. (2) Click the Zenfetch icon in a tab to save any PDF, YouTube video, note, article, email, forum post, etc. Zenfetch can save almost anything across the internet. (3) Zenfetch indexes the text or transcript and adds that information to your personal knowledge assistant. This is done on your computer so you don’t have to worry about paywalls, logins, etc. (4) Use the dashboard or side panel to search your knowledge or chat with your personal knowledge assistant.
We built Zenfetch to solve our personal problem: we were reading tons of content but using little to none of the information. While searching for solutions, we found that most tools were good at storing information but not at retrieving it. We even found that search functionalities on existing read-later tools got worse the more content we saved.
A few examples of how our users use Zenfetch: “What was that article I read on the new nuclear fusion company?”, “Analyze this strategy based on the Lenny Rachitsky article I read”, “Summarize Karpathys video introducing LLMs”, “Which research papers mentioned the increase in carbon emissions?”, “Compile the different perspectives I’ve read on climate change”, and more.
Zenfetch is free for the first 14 days and then costs $14.99/mo (No credit card needed for the trial).
We’d love for you to try it out and let us know what we can do to improve your experience! While we only work on Chromium-based browsers right now, we’re actively working on browser compatibility and integrations. Let us know which ones to prioritize!
I’ve been collecting bookmarks in Evernote and now obsidian for about a decade. I try to add as many tags as I hope will allow me to find an article again later. It’s often many months before I need to find something. My success rate at remembering a term from the title or the right tag is not great. I’ve been pretty impressed with zenfetch’s ability to search and find exactly what I was looking for. And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of what it can do when you want it to synthesize answers from many articles for you.
They’re also working on indexing your saved tweets which I’m excited about. It’s a giant pain to try to find liked tweets.
Happy to answer any questions you have, here are some preliminary notes that might be helpful:
1. We don't sell your data. Our business model is subscription based and we have DPAs with model providers to ensure none of that data is used for training 2. All data you explicitly save to zenfetch is encrypted in transit and at rest.
In the future, we'd like to move to a local-first platform where the data storage and processing takes place on your own machine
What did you mean by this? The data (articles which users save) you store remains encrypted?
I'm definitely going to give it a try. However, for it to become a permanent part of my routine, it would need a Safari browser extension and an iOS app (compatible with both iPhone and iPad) to allow easy sharing and saving of content from within other apps. Stuff that Raindrop supports.
Additionally, is there an API available so that I can manually script or route content from currently unsupported sources?
No API just yet, but if there's an integration you're looking for let us know and we will prioritize that. Thanks!
We simply found that there were things we didn't want in our first brain, let alone in our second brain. That's why we've taken a curated content approach.
Rewind captures everything, while Zenfetch only stores the content you've explicitly saved to signal there is value.
I don't need to be reminded of the accidental clickbait article I've opened :)
Eg. Let’s say I adopt Zenfetch, and start using it as the sole place where I keep bookmarks. Then, something happens such that I want to retrieve that original, principal, bookmark data.
How do I go about retrieving/exporting that?
Our goal is not to become a vendor lock-in play. Instead, Zenfetch is a layer on top of your knowledge base goaled on helping you activate information that you forgot about.
If you're referring to being able to revisit bookmarks: from the dashboard, you can click on any of the articles to see the original article
Let me know if more clarity is needed
Been a minute since the APL days though I still have fond memories of my time there. Big fan of the Pensieve analogy, maybe we'll throw that in the landing page lol
Adding articles to Zenfetch separately every time, seems quite inconvenient. Allowing users to sync articles from different RSS feeds (say Newsblur), or their reading app libraries (such as Omnivore/Pocket) seems like a good solution to this problem.
Great job!
1. We're not trying to become your personal knowledge management solution, we want to be the layer on top that helps you retrieve and use the knowledge you've stored.
2. The biggest reason we don't do this locally is we've found hosted models are much more powerful for the knowledge retrieval and synthesis use cases. However. we do hope to move more local over time.
Fast forward to today, I've been using Zenfetch for a few months now. Basically, everything I read, or wish I had the time to read / watch (they support Youtube too) gets saved on my Zenfetch library.
Being able to ask for summaries of stuff you are browsing in real time is great for picking up new knowledge.
Chatting with your entire library with 1,500+ saved articles and drawing correlations between different subjects + never forgetting anything, is next level.
Don't be the 'bookmarking this for later' guy.
As a statistician by training, I appreciate how the traditional inference techniques were helpful way before LLMs became mainstream for these tasks :)
Is that your browser of choice?
Also find myself having a pretty severe allergic reaction to websites (Gem is a recent example) roadblocking anything but Chrome (seemingly both because of their web app literally not functioning properly in Safari, and their browser extension being Chrome-only):
a) essentially forcing me to use Chrome for one task, whilst deal with password management in two places, etc., and
b) giving me the nagging worry that the design of the app or extension might contravene some non-technical standard imposed by Apple which Google does not honor…
Just like IE 6 I refuse to touch it if I can at all prevent it.
(Feel free to join in folks. We can do this, IE was much better entrenched at its worst.)
It is an ongoing effort to ensure truly factual answers and this is one of our top priorities :)
Also any support for importing from pinboard archives?
There are many other GPTs from outside OpenAI, such that GPT is the contemporary Escalator
How do you see this comparing to Pocket, Readwise, and Dewey? I think many Read Later apps will add AI search on top
