The Obsidian vault you did not have to write.
Tracebrain is a personal memory brain that builds itself from your Telegram and WhatsApp conversations: one living profile for every person you talk to, a nightly review of what was decided, promised and paid, and your promises turned into tasks, all in Markdown files you own. Download the vault at any time and it opens in Obsidian as a folder of linked notes: one per person, one per day, your tasks and your projects.
Obsidian and AI
Every Obsidian AI reads what you already wrote.
Search for Obsidian AI and you find plugins that work on your notes. They find the note related to the one you are writing, answer questions about the vault, draft a summary of a folder. They are good at it, and they all start from the same place: notes you took the time to write.
That is the weak point of a vault about people. A note about a client, a friend or an investor is only as current as the last time you sat down after a conversation and updated it. Most conversations end with nobody doing that, so the note about the person you talk to every week is the oldest note you have, and the promise you made them on Tuesday is in a Telegram thread rather than in Obsidian.
Tracebrain moves the AI to the other end. It reads the conversations themselves, one-to-one in Telegram and WhatsApp, and writes the notes: who each person is, what you promised them and what they promised you, what was decided each day, what is still open. The result is a folder of plain Markdown in the shape Obsidian expects, and the plugins above work on it like on any other vault.
The landscape
Obsidian AI, by what it reads and what it writes.
Obsidian itself and two of its best-known AI plugins, next to Tracebrain.
| Product | Price | Reads | Writes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Obsidian | Free; Sync $4 a month billed yearly, $5 monthly | Nothing by itself: it opens the Markdown files in a folder | What you type |
| Smart Connections | Free plugin; a Pro tier, price not on its page | The notes in your vault, matched locally by default | Nothing: it suggests related notes and passages |
| Copilot for Obsidian | Free plugin with your own API keys or subscription; a paid licence, price not on its page | Your vault, and with the paid tier the web, PDFs, YouTube and X | Answers, notes, links and canvases you ask it for |
| Tracebrain | $20 per month, after 7 days free. No free plan | Your one-to-one Telegram and WhatsApp conversations | A note per person and per day, a task list and projects, every night, without being asked |
Read on 11 October 2026 from obsidian.md/pricing, smartconnections.app and obsidiancopilot.com. Neither plugin page printed a price for its paid tier, so none is given here. Tracebrain is the only paid-only row. The plugins are not rivals to it: they work inside Obsidian on any vault, this one included.
The folder
Four folders and two files, the same in every vault.
What the export unpacks to, with two invented people and one invented project.
Trace/
├── 00_Me.md what the vault knows about you
├── 00_People_TODO.md what you owe, person by person
├── 01_Daily/
│ ├── 2026-10-08.md one review per day
│ └── 2026-10-09.md
├── 02_People/
│ ├── 000_template.md the shape of a person's note
│ ├── 007_Ines_Carvalho.md one living profile per person
│ └── 012_Tomas_Brandt.md
└── 03_Projects/
└── Studio website.md the people and notes of one piece of work02_People is the personal CRM. Every person you talk to gets one note, named with a number and their name so the folder sorts in the order people arrived. The top of a note holds the fields Obsidian shows as properties: relationship, birthday, city, email, phone, when you first met and when you last spoke, and the tag people. Below that come About, Mentions, Reminders and Ideas, written from the conversations, and last the history of what was said, newest first. 000_template.md is the empty shape every new note is made from.
Take an invented example. Ines Carvalho is a designer you are building a studio website with. After a month her note says she runs a two-person studio in Porto and prefers calls on Thursdays, that you promised her the copy for the about page by the 15th, that she mentioned her partner Tomas and links to his note, and that her birthday is in March because she said so in a message. Nobody typed any of it into Obsidian.
01_Daily holds one review per day: what was decided, what you promised, what was promised to you, money that moved, what is still open and who you talked to, under the same headings every day so a search a year later still works. The AI journal page reads a whole day of it. 00_People_TODO.md is the task list those promises turn into, grouped by the person waiting. 03_Projects files people and notes under the work they belong to, and 00_Me.md is what the vault has learned about you.
Everything is a link. A daily review names people by linking their notes, a task links the person it is owed to, a project links its people. Open the graph view and you see your network drawn from who you actually talk to, not from who you remembered to link.
From Tracebrain to Obsidian
Four steps, and no plugin.
Open Manage my data
In the Tracebrain app, Manage my data has two sections. Export is the first one.
Press Export my data
The whole vault is packed into a zip named after the day: people, message history, daily notes, tasks and projects. There is no limit on how often you do it and no waiting period.
Unzip it
The zip holds a single
Trace/folder. Put it wherever you keep vaults, next to your own if you have one.Open the folder as a vault
In Obsidian, choose to open a folder as a vault and pick
Trace/. Nothing is converted on the way, because the files were Markdown all along.
The export is a copy. What you change in Obsidian stays with you and does not flow back, and a later export does not overwrite your edited copy unless you unzip it over the top. Keep the Tracebrain vault as its own vault rather than merging it into yours: next week's export is then a clean replacement of one folder.
Claude Code and the vault
An assistant that already knows who everyone is.
Some people run their Obsidian vault with Claude Code: open the folder, ask a question, let it read the notes. The answers are only as good as the vault, and a vault about people goes stale. A Tracebrain vault does not, because it is rewritten from your conversations every night.
With an export, Claude Code reads the unpacked folder like any project. Ask it who you owe a reply, what you agreed with Ines last month, or to draft a follow-up from the open promises in the task list. It is working on files, so it can also change them, in your copy and nowhere else.
For the live vault, install the plugin instead: claude plugin marketplace add tracebrain/mcp, then claude plugin install tracebrain@tracebrain. Claude Code then asks Tracebrain directly, so it sees today's review without a new export. It can add a task, tick one off, start a project, note something about you or correct a line a pass wrote, and it cannot delete anything or touch the message history. The MCP page lists every tool.
Honest limits
What this is not, in Obsidian terms.
A live sync
The export is a snapshot. New days reach Obsidian when you export again, and edits in Obsidian do not reach Tracebrain.
A plugin
Nothing runs inside Obsidian. Tracebrain is a hosted service, and your conversations are read on its servers, not on your laptop. The Privacy Policy names everyone who sees them.
Free
Obsidian is free and the plugins are free to start. Tracebrain is $20 a month after the trial, and the price is for the writing, not for the files.
Every channel
Telegram and WhatsApp, one-to-one. Groups, calls, email, iMessage and LinkedIn are not in the vault yet.
Read further
The rest of the memory.
AI second brain
What Tracebrain remembers about one person and one day, and how it compares with second brains built from notes, screens and voice.
Read more →Personal CRMThe personal CRM that builds itself
The people folder on its own, against Dex, Mesh, Monica and the rest, with the rows where Tracebrain loses.
Read more →TelegramWhere the notes come from
How Tracebrain reads Telegram through your own login, read-only, and what one night of it writes.
Read more →FAQ
Questions people ask about Obsidian and AI.
Is there an Obsidian AI that writes notes for me?
Tracebrain writes them, though not from inside Obsidian. It reads your Telegram and WhatsApp conversations and keeps a note for every person, a review of every day, a task list and your projects, as Markdown files in one folder. Download that folder and Obsidian opens it as a vault. The AI plugins in the table above work the other way round: they read notes you have already written.
Can I use Obsidian as a personal CRM?
Yes, and many people do: a note per person from a template, a few frontmatter fields, and a Dataview query that lists who you have not spoken to in a while. It breaks on the same thing every time, which is that somebody has to write the notes after every conversation. Tracebrain is that somebody. It keeps the people notes from the messages themselves, and the personal CRM page compares it with Dex, Mesh and the rest.
Is this an Obsidian plugin?
No. Tracebrain is a hosted service that keeps your vault and writes into it every night. Obsidian is where you can open a copy of it. Nothing needs installing in Obsidian, and no plugin is required to read the files.
Does it sync with my vault in real time?
No. The export is a copy, made when you press the button. Edits you make in Obsidian stay on your machine and do not come back to Tracebrain, and new days appear in Obsidian when you export again. To ask about the live vault from an AI assistant, connect the MCP server instead.
Do the links work in Obsidian?
Yes. When a note mentions a person who has a note of their own, it links to that note by its file name with the person's name shown, the way Obsidian writes links itself, so the links resolve and the graph view draws who knows whom.
Can I use Claude Code with the vault?
Two ways. Point Claude Code at the unpacked folder and it reads the files like any other project. Or install the plugin — claude plugin marketplace add tracebrain/mcp, then claude plugin install tracebrain@tracebrain — and it asks the live vault, including the days written since your last export, with skills that know which question to ask.
What does it cost?
$20 per month after a 7-day free trial, with no free plan. That is more than Obsidian, which is free, and more than the plugins, which are free to start. The export itself costs nothing and has no limit. The pricing page says what happens to your vault if you stop paying.
Start
Open a vault you did not have to write.
Connect Telegram or WhatsApp, and the history you already have becomes the first people notes and daily reviews. Export it on the first evening and open it in Obsidian: that is the quickest way to see whether it is a vault you would keep.
$20 per month after 7 days free. A card is taken when the trial starts; cancel before it ends and you pay nothing.