every family has one person who knows all the stories. the recipe nobody wrote down. the night train they took with forty rupees in their pocket. the advice they repeat every sunday until you stop listening. and one day nobody can ask them ...
every family has one person who knows all the stories.
the recipe nobody wrote down. the night train they took with forty rupees in their pocket. the advice they repeat every sunday until you stop listening.
and one day nobody can ask them anymore.
i started Memoria for the Hacktoberfest weekend challenge ("build for a friend"). i'll be honest, i missed the deadline. but the thing works and i want people to use it, so i'm shipping it anyway.
live: https://memoria-family.vercel.app
code: https://github.com/CoderRahul01/memoria
what it does
-> you sit with them and press record. they talk, in any language
-> the words get written down, given a title and a year, and filed in that person's album
-> the album has a little timeline of their life, placed by year
-> later, anyone in the family can ask "how did nani make the dal?"
-> the answer comes back with her exact words underneath, and which story they came from
if she never talked about it, Memoria says "she hasn't talked about this yet" and gives you a button to record that story next.
that one rule mattered more than any feature. an app that makes things up about someone you love is worse than no app.
the recorder is a cassette
the first version had a generic mic button. it felt like a voice memo app.
now it's a cassette tape. the reels turn while you record, and the tape slowly winds from the left reel to the right as time passes. it sounds small, but older people get it instantly. they've done this before.
how it's built (open models at the core)
-> Gemma 4 (31B) through Backboard writes the titles, answers questions and keeps each person's memory. Backboard also lets me fall back to the faster Gemma 4 26B when the big one is slow
-> Tinker serves a Qwen 3.6 checkpoint as the backup model
-> ElevenLabs does transcription in 90+ languages, read-aloud, and (with consent) their own voice
-> Render runs the server, Vercel serves the site, Neon holds the data
-> Dodo Payments for a one-time $19 "Lifetime"
why open matters here: these are someone's family stories. i want to be able to swap the model, run it somewhere else, or fine-tune it on how a family actually talks, without asking a closed API for permission. the app doesn't care which open model answers, as long as it only answers from what was said.
the boring stuff that makes it launchable
this is the part nobody posts about.
-> no sign-up. each family gets a private space and a link. share it with your siblings and they can add stories too
-> it can't run my credits dry. every paid call is logged against a monthly budget. the last 10% is kept for paying families. free families fall back to the device voice, the browser transcript or the backup model. the app keeps working, it just gets a bit simpler
-> paying families fund the expensive parts. the natural voice and voice cloning are Lifetime features, so the $19 pays for the credits it uses
-> analytics live outside the app. i built Pulse, a separate dashboard that reads read-only views from the database. it can count stories but can't read a single word of them
rule: if your analytics can read your users' private stuff, it's not analytics, it's a liability.
what's next
-> email sign-in as a second key, so a lost link never means lost stories
-> an interview mode where it asks the next question based on what they just said
-> a printed hardcover book
and every project i build this october follows the same shape: same deploy setup, same credit guard, same Pulse dashboard. week 1 is already in progress.
who's the first person in your family you'd record?
i post the build as it happens on X: x.com/rahulpandey187