About
One person. iPhone-led.
Built around the fire.
Bonfiyah is a deliberate constraint exercise. One developer, one Apple ecosystem, one core idea — that the conversations you have are stories worth keeping, and that an app can do that work without growing into a 50-person company.
Origin
Why "Bonfiyah."
Long before written language, the bonfire was where humans gathered to tell stories. People sat around it, talked, listened, remembered. The fire was a recording technology — imperfect, communal, durable.
"Bonfiyah" is a play on "bonfire." The product is what happens when the gathering tradition meets modern AI: every conversation you have is a story worth keeping, and the place those stories live should feel less like a database and more like a fire.
The orange and amber of the icon — sampled from the inside of a real flame — is the brand color for the same reason. It's warm. It draws people in. It's not a "tech" color.
The constraints
Three things Bonfiyah will never be.
Software companies usually shape themselves by what they add. Bonfiyah is shaping itself by what it refuses.
Apple-only.
iPhone-led, with iPad and Mac via Catalyst. No Android. No web app. No Linux. Going deep on one ecosystem is what lets us ship Live Activities, Watch complications, on-device Whisper, real-time iCloud sync, and the polish you feel using the app.
If you need cross-platform, Otter and Notta exist; we won't pretend to be that.
Solo, forever.
A team of one has different constraints than a team of fifty. Solo means every feature has to earn its keep. Solo means decisions get made faster but require more discipline to make well. Solo means the founder reads every support email.
No Series A, no 30-person growth team, no management layer.
Consent-first.
Other recording apps treat consent as the user's problem. Bonfiyah builds two-party consent management as a first-class feature, in every tier including Free, because making it a paid upsell would be tasteless. Recording someone without their consent is a category of harm we don't want our free users to do.
Why Pro AI exists
The category sells summaries. We sell what comes after.
The category — "AI conversation app" — is full of products that summarize meetings. Summaries are the easy demo. They tell you what was discussed; they don't tell you what mattered.
The harder, more useful work happens at the cross-recording layer: tracking commitments across meetings, catching contradictions across weeks, briefing you before the next conversation with the same person, building a profile of how each person you talk to communicates. Pro AI is the tier that does that work.
$19.99/month is more than the category leader. The math is honest: cross-recording inference costs more than per-recording summarization. Pro AI runs seven on-device transformer passes across your full library — Promise Tracker, Truth Layer, Pre-Brief, People Memory, Story Mode, Speaker Themes, and Action Items. None of those have analogues in Otter, Notta, or Plaud.
The 7-day free trial is so you can decide whether the work being done is worth the price for you.
Roadmap
What's coming.
Real-time testimony analysis dashboard
An iPad-first view that runs during a deposition or hearing: live transcription on one panel, contradictions vs. case file on another, color-coded testimony tags on a third. Targeted for v1.3, ~Q4 2026.
Jury-selection grid
Multi-panel iPad view for voir dire — color-coded juror tracking, real-time question-answer attribution, bias-pattern flagging. Targeted for v1.3.
The roadmap is open.
Read the comparison pages, the feature deep-dives, the blog. If something you wish Bonfiyah did isn't on the list, email hello@bonfiyah.com — most of what ends up shipping started as a conversation with a user.
Who I am
Richard Hearn.
I've been writing software for a long time. Bonfiyah is the product I would have wanted ten years ago, and the product I want now.
I'm reachable at richard@bonfiyah.com; you'll get a real reply. If your conversation needs an indie iOS dev who'll hear you out, that's the right address.
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