Show HN: I built a plugin to create a ChatGPT archive with Typemill CMS

Remember when we all worried about how much Google knew about us? Now imagine what ChatGPT has learned in just a few years. From brainstorms to business strategies, support replies to technical drafts, your AI chats likely contain more of your intellectual property than your hard drive.

The problem? All that knowledge lives on someone else’s server. You can’t fully search it, organize it, or control it. And once you're dependent on it, the rules (and the pricing) can change at any time.

But there’s a way out.

OpenAI allows you to download your full ChatGPT archive. Sadly, it’s barely usable: a massive HTML file and a large JSON dump. That’s why I built the ChatGPT Archive Plugin for Typemill: to turn your archive into something useful, portable, and yours.

Your Ideas Deserve a Home that You Control

First, what is Typemill? Typemill is a lightweight, self-hosted open-source CMS designed for documentation, manuals, and small knowledge bases. It stores content as Markdown files, one of the most portable and future-proof formats available. You can use those files anywhere: in GitHub, Obsidian, static site generators, or other Markdown tools.

With the new ChatGPT Archive plugin, you can upload your entire .zip export directly into Typemill. The plugin reads the JSON file in your archive, lists all conversations, and lets you select which ones to convert into editable Markdown pages. You can then sort, edit, and structure them however you like, right inside Typemill.

From AI History to Knowledge Base

At first, this plugin gives you a 1:1 editable archive of your ChatGPT chats. But it doesn’t stop there.

Typemill includes an AI interface that connects with ChatGPT and Claude. Once your chats are imported, you can summarize them, extract insights, or generate clean documentation using your own prompts. You can even save custom prompts in a prompt library and reuse them by topic.

For example: if you’ve used ChatGPT to solve coding problems, you could create a prompt that extracts only the final working code and explanation — instantly turning messy chat logs into clean developer docs.

How to Get Started

Getting up and running takes just three simple steps:

1. Download and install Typemill from the homepage
2. Install the ChatGPT Archive plugin from the plugin page
3. Download and import your ChatGPT data from OpenAI

If you're new to Typemill, I recommend reading the quickstart guide in the documentation. The installation process is similar to WordPress but much simpler and more straightforward.

Think Ahead: Own Your Future AI Stack

Typemill and this plugin are just the beginning. Imagine hosting your own AI model within your organization. With your ChatGPT data now converted to structured Markdown, you could feed it directly into a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline.

It’s your knowledge, your infrastructure, and your future.

And the best part? Markdown is the simplest and most AI-friendly format for structured text. That means your knowledge is not just portable — it’s future-proof.