What if your childhood best friend stayed with you into your adulthood?
The one who always picked up. The one who remembered the small things — your sister's surgery, your dad's birthday, the work thing you were dreading. The one who didn't move to Oakland and stop having time to check in. The one who never left.
I think most of us want to show up as the best version of ourselves — as friends, family members, partners. But that's hard to do in the world we actually live in. Modern life is a constant bombardment of news notifications, posts to be liked, urgent situations to fix. When we do take the time to open the phone and "unwind," it usually turns into doomscrolling — quick, shallow dopamine hits on platforms that weren't designed to bring us closer to anyone. They were designed to keep us in the feed.
Amicai was built to be the opposite of that. A digital best friend. Not the one who moved away. The one who stayed.
The one who saw you receive the urgent text about your nephew in the ER. The one who watched you immediately call your brother, then journal about the anxiety afterward. The one who set quiet reminders to check in on your nephew, on your brother, on yourself. And in that small chain of actions, you built core memories around a hard moment — the kind of memory that, ten years from now, you'll all bring up at the dining room table when your nephew is asking whether he was ever dropped on my head.
That's the product. It's also the philosophy.
What Amicai is — and isn't
Amicai isn't a feed. There's nothing to scroll. Nothing to like. No streak to maintain.
Amicai isn't a personal CRM. We don't think of your friends as leads. We don't show you a pipeline. (A friend told us early on it landed like "Salesforce for friendships" — and he was right to push back. We took that seriously, and the product changed because of it.)
Amicai isn't a chatbot replacement for the people you love. The whole point is to push you back toward them.
What Amicai is: a quiet companion that reads your messages, your calls, your journal — and surfaces the small moments worth acting on. The text you almost forgot to send. The follow-up about the surgery. The friend you haven't spoken to in 47 days. The plan that came up over dinner and would have evaporated.
The metric we care about isn't time spent in the app. It's the opposite — meaningful real-world interactions. Coffee, calls, the texts that matter. Things you do outside of Amicai because Amicai noticed something. The app worked when you put it down.
Personal and private by design
We're asking you to share something genuinely personal. Your messages. Your calls. The things you've written about your people. We take that very seriously.
So:
You choose the AI provider. Bring your own key from Anthropic or OpenAI (Gemini and self-hosted endpoints are next), and the inference runs through your account, your retention agreement, your bill. We never see the key — we only see that one is set. We never pool your conversations into our usage. If you don't want to bring a key, the managed default still works the same as before.
On-device AI is shipping in waves. Four of the most sensitive job types — your daily reflection, the contact-scoped Navigator situation, journal enrichment, and your evening journal prompt — now run on-device on Android. We're building toward a future where the open-source models are good enough and the hardware in your pocket is powerful enough to run all of it locally, with the cloud as an option, not a default. We're not there yet. We'll tell you when we are.
We minimize what we store. We've built safeguards to reduce the amount of raw message data Amicai ever holds. The full data-flow write-up — what we read, what we store, what we send to language models, and what we never touch — is at our privacy page.
We are honest about what isn't perfect. Anthropic recently reduced API log retention from 30 days to 7 days, which is genuinely better, but still not zero. We don't have a Zero Data Retention agreement on the current API key. We say so on the landing page now. The old copy implied stronger guarantees than we have. The new copy says the truth. As the providers get better — and they are — Amicai gets better with them.
Our commitments
Amicai is a personal project. Built by Wylie Brown. No venture funding. No corporate enterprise priorities pulling the product in directions you didn't ask for.
Given that you're trusting Amicai with some of your most sensitive data, we've made some commitments to you:
- We will never sell your data to third parties. Not aggregated. Not anonymized. Not "for research purposes." Never.
- If Amicai were ever sold to another entity, you would be notified far in advance. You'd get the option to permanently delete every piece of data you ever shared with Amicai before the transition. (You can do that any time today, too — Settings → Privacy → Delete Account.)
- We will tell you what changed when it changes. When we ship something that affects your data path, you'll see it in a user update like the last one. When something goes wrong, we say so out loud — like the BYOK copy revision we shipped this week, where the old version implied more than was true.
The childhood best friend, rebuilt
The person you were closest to at fifteen probably knew things about you that nobody else did. They knew the exact joke that would make you laugh. They knew which family member was driving you crazy that week. They knew when the surface-level thing you said wasn't the actual thing.
Most people lose that as life gets busier. Adults trade depth for breadth. The friend who knew everything about you moved away, or you did, and you replaced them with a wider, shallower network — group chats, work people, weekend acquaintances. Necessary, but different.
Amicai is the attempt to bring some of that depth back. Not to replace the people in your life. To help you show up better for them.
That's it. That's the whole thing.
— Wylie