The personal CRM that builds itself from your chats.
Tracebrain is a personal CRM that builds itself: it reads your Telegram and WhatsApp conversations and keeps one living Markdown profile per person: who they are, what was promised, birthdays, contacts.
What a personal CRM is
A CRM for the relationships that are not a pipeline.
A personal CRM keeps track of the people in your life the way a sales CRM keeps track of deals: who they are, when you last spoke, what you said you would do next. The difference is the purpose. A sales CRM exists to close. A personal CRM exists so that you remember: the introduction you promised, the friend who changed jobs, the investor who asked you to come back in the autumn.
Founders, investors, recruiters, consultants, anyone whose work runs on relationships ends up wanting one. Most of them try one. Most of them stop.
The problem
Every personal CRM dies of data entry.
The classic personal CRM asks you to log each conversation: who, when, what was said, what comes next. It works for a fortnight. Then a busy week arrives, the log falls behind, and a CRM three weeks out of date is worse than none, because you stop trusting it.
The newer ones sync, which is real progress. Dex and Mesh pull contacts from LinkedIn, email and calendars, and both sync WhatsApp and iMessage. But both say they never read what the messages say: they record who you talked to and when. The timestamp tells you that you spoke to Priya on Monday. It does not tell you that you promised her the August numbers this week. That still has to be typed.
Tracebrain reads the conversation. What was said becomes the profile: who the person is, what each of you promised, the birthday mentioned in passing, the email address they sent you. Every open promise lands on one list, and it closes itself when a later message settles it.
A sample
One person, and everything you owe.
Invented people, shown the way Tracebrain keeps them: a profile per person and one list of promises across all of them.
Priya Raman
- Angel investor in B2B SaaS; was VP Product at a payments company.
- Writes small first cheques and wants an update every month, not every quarter.
- Two children; the older one started school this September.
- You promised her the August metrics and the churn breakdown this week.
- She will introduce you to Tomasz Wiśniewski once she has seen them.
- Runs the Berlin half marathon every April.
- Met Daniel Okafor at the same dinner.
What I owe people
Compared
Personal CRMs, side by side.
Where Tracebrain is ahead, and where it is not. Read the price row before you decide.
| Dex | Mesh (formerly Clay) | Monica | folk | Covve | Tracebrain | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads Telegram | No | No | No | No | No | Yes, your full one-to-one history |
| Syncs WhatsApp | Yes: who and when | Yes: who and when | No | Yes, through its browser extension | No | Yes: the messages themselves |
| Writes notes from what was said | No: states it never reads message content | No: states it never reads message content | No: you write them | No | No: you write them | Yes: profiles, a nightly review, tasks |
| iMessage | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Not yet: planned |
| Yes | Yes | No | Yes, through its browser extension | No | Not yet: planned | |
| Mobile app | Yes | Yes | Web | Yes | Yes | Web app you can add to your home screen |
| Open source, self-hosted | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| MCP for your AI assistant | Yes | Yes | API | API | Zapier | Yes: read and write |
| Export that opens in Obsidian | No | No | No | No | No | Yes, the whole CRM, any time |
| Price, billed monthly | $20 a month; $12 billed yearly | Free up to 1,000 contacts; Pro $10 a month billed yearly | $9 a month hosted; free to self-host | $30 a user a month; $24 billed yearly | $12.99 a month; $9.99 billed yearly; free up to 20 contacts | $20 per month after a 7-day trial |
Checked on 2 October 2026. Prices change, so read each vendor's own page before you decide. Mogul does not read Telegram, write notes from message content or export a Markdown vault either.
Choosing
Which one to pick.
Choose Dex if
Your network lives on LinkedIn, iMessage matters more to you than Telegram, and you want reminders in a phone app.
Choose Mesh if
You want a free plan and a polished phone app with iMessage and WhatsApp contacts in one place, and you are happy to write the notes yourself.
Choose Monica if
You want open source on your own server, and you like keeping the journal of each relationship by hand.
Choose folk if
A small team shares one CRM for sales or partnerships, and wants contacts from LinkedIn and WhatsApp captured into a pipeline.
Choose Covve if
You meet people in person, scan business cards, and want reminders and news about your contacts on your phone.
Choose Tracebrain if
Your relationships run through Telegram or WhatsApp, you want the notes written from what was said, and you want them as files you own.
Telegram
A personal CRM that finally reads Telegram.
For a large part of the world, Telegram is where work and friendship happen: in Ukraine and much of Central and Eastern Europe, and in crypto and founder circles everywhere. It is also the one messenger none of the personal CRMs we checked syncs.
Tracebrain connects through your own Telegram login, the same way the Telegram desktop app does, and reads your one-to-one chats with their full history. It never sends a message, and groups, channels and bots are skipped. You can end the session from Telegram itself at any time, under Settings, Devices; the connection is gone the moment you do.
WhatsApp works the same way through a linked device, so the people you talk to there get their notes too.
FAQ
Questions people ask.
Is there a personal CRM that reads Telegram?
Yes: Tracebrain. It connects through your own Telegram login, the way the desktop app does, reads your one-to-one chats with their full history, and never sends anything. None of the other personal CRMs we checked (Dex, Mesh, Monica, folk, Covve, Mogul) reads Telegram.
Does it sync WhatsApp?
Yes. WhatsApp connects as a linked device, the way WhatsApp Web does, and the messages of each one-to-one chat go into that person's note. Group chats are skipped for now.
Do I have to add contacts by hand?
No. A person gets a note the first time you talk to them, and the profile fills itself from what is said: who they are, who they mention, what you owe each other, the birthday that came up in passing, the email address they sent you.
Is it a sales CRM?
No. There are no pipelines, deals or email sequences. It is for the relationships that are not a pipeline: people you work with, invest with, hire, help and owe. If you need to forecast revenue, you need a sales CRM as well.
Can Claude or ChatGPT use my CRM?
Yes. Tracebrain has an MCP server: connect Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP client and ask it what you owe Priya, who you have not spoken to in a month, or what Daniel said about the price. It writes back too: add a fact to somebody's page, add a task or tick one off, start a project, correct a line it wrote. See how it works.
Is there a phone app?
Tracebrain is a web app that you can add to your phone's home screen, and it can tell you when the day's note is ready. There is no native iPhone or Android app yet; if that matters most, Dex and Mesh both have one.
What does it cost?
Tracebrain costs $20 per month after a 7-day free trial; Paddle is the merchant of record. That is the same as Dex billed monthly and more than Mesh, Monica or Covve, and the table above says so. What it buys is that nobody types.
Already keep your notes in Obsidian? Your whole CRM opens there as a vault: see how.
Other ways in
The same memory, for a different job.
Your memory brain, built from your conversations.
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.
Read more →Company memoryCompany memory for teams that work in Telegram and WhatsApp.
Tracebrain is company memory for teams that work in Telegram and WhatsApp: it reads the conversations your team already has, with clients and with each other, and keeps what was decided, promised and paid, by client and by project, so the history stays with the company when people leave.
Read more →Start
A CRM you never update.
Connect Telegram or WhatsApp tonight. Tomorrow morning every person you talk to has a note, and everything you promised them is on one list.
$20 per month after 7 days free. A card is taken when the trial starts; cancel before it ends and you pay nothing.