Meet Heirloom — Capture the stories before they're gone

Lifestyle

Heirloom

Capture the stories before they're gone.

Every feature, from the first launch.

No account, no login, no cloud. Everything runs on your device and works fully offline — nothing in this post is hidden behind a wall.

What Heirloom does

Heirloom is the warm, private vault for the stories, recipes, voices, and wisdom of the people you love — built so a family can capture what would otherwise walk out the door.

The $10T US family business sector is facing the largest generational transfer in history. The harder, more personal version of that transfer is happening in every family: a grandparent who remembers the village, a parent who knows the recipe by feel, an uncle who built the business out of nothing. When they go, the knowledge goes too. Heirloom is for the family that knows this — and wants to do something about it before it's too late.

What ships in v1:

— Story library: tap one button to record a story. Heirloom uses on-device Speech transcription to turn the recording into searchable text. Attach photos. Tag the people, places, and decade. — People register: add the people in the family — name, relation, years, where they were born, what they were known for, and a portrait photo. A simple, beautiful family book. — Recipe vault: snap the handwritten card. On-device Vision OCR reads the ingredients and steps. Add your grandmother's voice clip explaining the trick to the dough. — Wisdom cards: short maxims, sayings, and lessons — the things they always said. Pull a random one each morning. — 100+ story prompts: bundled prompts that get an elder talking, organized by life chapter (childhood, work, love, hard times, hopes). "Tell me about the house you grew up in." "What was your first paycheck?" "Who taught you to cook?" — Heirloom Bundle: pick stories, add a cover, and export a PDF book ready to print on demand or share with the family. — Quiet by default: no account, no analytics, no cloud, no SDK. Audio, transcripts, and photos stay on your device. The family album never becomes a marketing dataset. — Completely free: no IAPs, no "Pro", no upsell.

Heirloom is for the adult child sitting across from a parent who has started to forget — and for everyone who has the chance to capture a voice that, one day, will only exist on a phone.

A look inside

Tap any screenshot to open the full-resolution version.

What's inside

Story library — One-tap audio + on-device transcription.
People register — Family book with portraits and key facts.
Recipe vault — Handwritten recipe OCR.
Wisdom cards — Short maxims and a daily card.
Prompt bank — 100+ curated questions.
PDF book export — Stitch stories into a printable book.

Why we built it

Family histories are passed orally and disappear when the person passes. The closest existing tools — StoryWorth ($99/yr, mail-order book), StoryCorps (great content, not a personal capture tool), Apple Voice Memos (no transcription, no tagging) — all miss the same thing: a calm, beautiful, on-device library that comb…

What makes it different

Heirloom is the only iOS app that combines (a) one-tap voice capture with on-device transcription, (b) a family people register with portraits, (c) a handwritten-recipe OCR vault, (d) a curated prompt bank, AND (e) a printable PDF book export — without an account, a subscription, or any data leaving the device. StoryW…

Who it's for

Hobbyists who want a tool that respects their time, their gear, and their offline life.

In one line: Capture the stories before they're gone.

Try it

See the Heirloom app page for the full feature list, the info table, and support links.

Use Heirloom, found a bug, or have a feature request? Comments are open below — anonymous is fine.