About

The name is borrowed from museums

Walk through any great museum and you’re seeing a rounding error. Most of what it owns sits in storage, often more than ninety percent, seen by almost nobody. In the 1970s some curators decided this was daft and put the stores behind glass instead of behind doors, so you could wander past thousands of objects at once. The Met has done it since 1988.

The practice is called visible storage. It seemed like the right thing to name ourselves after.

Take your collection out of the basement

The photos are in one company’s cloud, the posts in another’s, the check-ins in an app that pivoted, the books you rated on a site nobody has opened since 2019. None of it was lost on purpose. It just went into storage nobody bothered to build a door for.

What it actually does

Visible Storage takes the exports the platforms will give you. The Twitter archive, the Google Takeout, the photo dump, the zip files sitting in your downloads folder since a Sunday in 2019. It unpacks them somewhere permanent and puts twenty years back into one order.

Two things follow. You can search all of it at once, rather than hunting through five apps that each hold a piece and any of which could be gone next year. And we start surfacing moments back to you unprompted, like the ramen place you went to every Thursday in 2014.

We made ourselves optional

A strange thing to do on purpose, and the part we’re proudest of. Your archive doesn’t sit on our servers. It sits on a private server in a cloud account with your name on it. We could vanish tomorrow and it would carry on without us.

Every app that ever lost your history was, at the time, a perfectly reasonable place to keep it. So we won’t insist we’re the exception. We’d rather build it so you never have to take our word for it.

No ads, and nothing here trains a model. The plan is that you pay your own cloud bill and a small fee to us for the software on top, which is the only business model we’ve found that doesn’t eventually get hungry and start eyeing your data.

Who “we” is

Pickaxe LLC, a small company in New York. We also make Iterate, which helps companies listen to their customers. Small enough that an email reaches someone who can change the thing you’re emailing about, and we intend to stay that way for as long as we can get away with it.

Where things stand

Early. Invite-only, alpha, held together with tape in a couple of places you’ll find before we do. We’re covering the cloud bill while it stays that way. If you’re already in, thank you, and keep telling us what’s broken.

If you’re not, there’s a waitlist on the home page. It’s short, and so is the queue, for now.

We are the kind of people who keep the box the thing came in. This is that, for the last twenty years of your life online.