Quiet
It reminds you, but it does not nag. There is no feed, no badge that keeps growing while you sleep, and nothing that rewards you for opening the app more often.
Open source · Self-hosted · Free
Pick up where you left off.
Rekindly is a quiet place for everything you know about the people in your life, and before every call, visit or meeting it tells you in a few lines where you left off.
It is made for the friend you have not called in months, for the client you meet once a quarter and for the aunt whose birthday always arrives sooner than expected. You write down what matters after a conversation, and Rekindly brings it back at the moment you need it, on your own server and without anyone else looking over your shoulder.
Why Rekindly
Relationships live on continuity, not on contact data.
Most of us do not forget people; we forget the thread. We remember that a friend was about to move, but not whether the move happened. We know that a colleague mentioned a difficult project, but not how it ended. The details are scattered across chats, emails, notebooks and our own memory, and when the next conversation comes, they are nowhere to be found.
Rekindly gathers those threads in one place and arranges them around the next conversation. It is not a database that wants to be maintained and not a feed that competes for your attention. It is a notebook with a good memory, which hands you the right page at the right time, so that you can listen better and ask the question that shows you were paying attention last time.
The name describes what it is for. The point is not to collect people, but to rekindle the connections that matter to you, whether they belong to your private life or to your work.
Before the conversation
A briefing that fits on a single screen.
When you open a person, the first thing you see is what you need for the next conversation: the follow-ups you promised, the facts you pinned because they matter, a summary of the last conversation, the next birthday and how long it has been since you last spoke. Everything else, from contact details to the complete history, is only a short scroll away.
Writing things down is meant to take seconds rather than minutes. After a call you type a few lines into the quick entry, mention people with @name, mark the entry as a call with /call and set a follow-up in two weeks with /wv 2w. Entries are written in Markdown and linked to everyone who took part, so a dinner with three friends appears on all three pages.
Every morning
One page for what is due today.
The Today page collects the follow-ups that are due or overdue, the birthdays of the next two weeks and the people you have not spoken to for longer than you intended. For each person you decide how often you want to be in touch, perhaps every month for a close friend and every quarter for a business contact, and Rekindly quietly lets you know when that time has passed.
From the next release on, Rekindly can also send you a short summary by email every morning, if you would rather have it in your inbox. There are no streaks, no scores and no badges, because staying in touch should never feel like a game you are losing.
Life and work
Private and business, side by side but never mixed.
Many of the people who matter to us are not friends in the narrow sense. They are clients, colleagues and partners, or the neighbour who runs the bakery around the corner. Rekindly gives them a place as well, but in separate spaces: Private and Business are there from the start, and you can add your own, each with its own colour.
Spaces are more than a filter. For each space you decide which devices receive its contacts, whether it appears in a calendar subscription and whether an AI provider may ever see it, so that what you know about your family never ends up in the same place as what you know about your customers.
PrivateFamily and friends, synced to your own phone
BusinessClients and colleagues, kept out of the AI
ClubA space of your own, for whatever you need
Find anything
Everything you know, one keystroke away.
Press ⌘K or Ctrl K anywhere and start typing. The search covers names, companies, roles, facts, notes and contact details, it understands that Müller, Mueller and Muller are the same person, and it answers within a few milliseconds even when you have thousands of entries. From the same palette you can log a call or create a new person without reaching for the mouse.
Rekindly is designed for the keyboard throughout, with J and K to move through lists and small hints on the buttons, yet it works just as well with a mouse or with your thumb on a phone.
Where your contacts already live
Your phone’s address book, kept in sync both ways.
Rekindly speaks CardDAV, the open standard that the iPhone, macOS, Thunderbird and many Android apps use for contacts. You connect a device once, and from then on your people appear in its own address book with names, numbers, addresses, birthdays and photos. When you change a number on the phone, Rekindly picks it up, and when you delete a contact there, it moves to Rekindly’s trash instead of disappearing for good.
Follow-ups and birthdays can also be subscribed to as a calendar, so they show up next to your appointments. Each device gets its own password and only sees the spaces you choose for it.
Your data
On your server, in open formats, with backups you can read.
Rekindly runs as a single Docker container with a SQLite database, on a home server, a Raspberry Pi or a small virtual server. It does not phone home, it contains no analytics, and it never contacts a service that you have not configured yourself.
You can export everything at any time as JSON or vCard, and Rekindly can store an encrypted backup every night on WebDAV storage such as Nextcloud or on any S3-compatible storage. Bringing your contacts in is just as easy: exports from Apple, Google or Outlook are imported with a preview, duplicate detection and an undo button, and people who turn out to be duplicates later can be merged with care.
Optional help
AI when you ask for it, and only with what you allow.
If you want, Rekindly can condense a long history into a short briefing, suggest facts from a note you have just written, or answer questions such as who you know at a particular company. You can use a local model through LM Studio or Ollama, so that nothing leaves your own network, or a cloud provider of your choice. AI is switched off by default and has to be allowed separately for every space.
For your own tools there is a documented REST API with personal tokens and an MCP server, which lets an assistant such as Claude look up what you know about someone, again only within the spaces you have released.
At a glance
What is in version 0.1.
People and organizations
Names, contact details, addresses, photos, birthdays with or without a year, how you met, tags and custom fields, and organizations with departments and sites.
Timeline
Notes, calls, meetings and messages in Markdown, each one linked to everyone who was involved.
Facts
Short things worth remembering, which you can pin into the briefing when they matter.
Follow-ups
Reminders attached to a person, due on a certain day and shown on the Today page and in your calendar.
Contact rhythm
How often you want to be in touch with someone, with a gentle nudge when it has been too long.
Relationships
Partners, children, colleagues and the people you met through someone else, including indirect contacts you never speak to yourself.
Search
Full-text search across everything, tolerant of umlauts and accents, with a command palette for the keyboard.
Spaces
Separate areas such as Private and Business, each with its own settings for sync and AI.
Address book and calendar
Two-way sync over CardDAV and a calendar subscription for follow-ups and birthdays.
Import and duplicates
vCard and CSV with a preview and undo, and a duplicate finder that merges people carefully.
Export and backups
Full export as JSON or vCard, and nightly encrypted backups to WebDAV or S3.
Passkeys
Sign in with Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello or a security key instead of a password.
AI, API and MCP
Optional AI with local or cloud models, limited per space, plus a REST API and an MCP server.
Languages and appearance
English and German, with light and dark mode that follows your system.
Coming next: themes
Six themes for light and dark, five layouts for the person page, and your own themes, shared as a file. In the next release.
Coming next: mail
A daily summary by email and optional sign-in codes by email, in the next release.
One container
SQLite and your photos in a single data volume, with images for amd64 and arm64.
Principles
How Rekindly is meant to feel.
Private
An installation belongs to the person who runs it. Your notes stay on your server, and nothing is sent anywhere unless you have set it up yourself.
Yours to keep
Every piece of data can be exported in open formats, and the code is free software under the AGPL, so you can read it, change it and run it as you like.
Built to last
One container, one database file and no external services to look after. An installation you set up today should still be running quietly in five years.
Get started
Up and running in two minutes.
All you need is a computer or server with Docker. Start the container with the command below, open the address in your browser and create your account; the first start walks you through it.
docker run -d --name rekindly -p 3000:3000 \
-v rekindly-data:/data \
-e PUBLIC_URL=http://localhost:3000 \
ghcr.io/dddanny79/rekindly:latest- Run the command on the machine that should host Rekindly.
- Open
http://localhost:3000and create your account. - Add the first people by hand, or import them from your address book.
For everyday use behind HTTPS, which passkeys and the iPhone require, the documentation describes setups with Docker Compose, Coolify and the common reverse proxies. Images are published for amd64 and arm64, so a Raspberry Pi serves just as well as a rented server.
Documentation
- Installation, Docker Compose, Coolify, reverse proxy
- iPhone, CardDAV and the calendar subscription
- Importing contacts and finding duplicates
- Export, restore and automatic backups
- Daily summary and sign-in codes by email
- AI features and providers
- API tokens and the MCP server
- All releases and changes
Questions
Questions and answers.
Does Rekindly cost anything?
No. Rekindly is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License 3.0. You run it yourself, so the only costs are those of your own server, and there is no paid edition that you would be nudged towards.
Who is it for?
It is for anyone who cares about staying in touch and has more people in their life than they can keep in their head: people with a large family or circle of friends, freelancers and consultants who want to remember their clients as people, and anyone who simply wants to be better prepared for the next conversation.
Do I need technical knowledge?
You need to be able to start a Docker container, or have a tool such as Coolify, Unraid or a NAS that does it for you. Once Rekindly is running, everything else happens in the browser.
Can several people use one installation?
At the moment an installation belongs to one person, who can keep private and business contacts apart in separate spaces. Support for several users who share selected spaces is being planned.
Can I bring my existing contacts?
Yes. Rekindly imports vCard files from Apple, Google or Outlook, CSV files, and the export of Monica, an established open-source app with a related purpose. Every import shows a preview first, recognizes people you already have and can be undone as a whole.
Does it work on my phone?
Yes, in two ways. The web app is designed for small screens and can be added to your home screen, and your contacts can be synced into the phone’s own address book over CardDAV.
Where is my data stored?
In a single SQLite database and a folder for photos, both inside the data volume of the container. You can copy, back up and move them like any other files, and Rekindly can additionally create encrypted backups on its own.
Is AI involved?
Only if you switch it on. The AI features are off by default, can run on a local model in your own network, and only ever see the spaces you have explicitly released for them.
Somebody is waiting to hear from you.
Install Rekindly, write down what you remember about them, and let the next conversation begin where the last one ended.