Brief reads your iMessages on your Mac, finds the things you actually need to act on — appointments, tasks, payments, follow-ups — and lines them up on your iPhone for a quick review. Plus a tight morning brief.
Join the beta — we'll send you the install steps.
Mac + iPhone · macOS 14+ and iOS 17+
Got it. Here's how to get started — takes about five minutes.
macOS 14+ and iOS 17+
What is Brief? · 45 seconds
Your Mac does the reading. Your iPhone is mission control.
The Brief menu-bar app reads your Messages on a schedule and surfaces only the genuinely actionable stuff — not "haha" and "on my way."
A clean, prioritized queue. Each item is summarized in plain language, color-coded Work or Personal, with the date and time already pulled out.
Tap a card for a pre-filled draft — title, date, notes — edit anything, then add it straight to Apple Reminders or Calendar.
Smart filtering means only real action items show up. Swipe, draft, done.
Weather, your day, the news that matters to you, your teams' scores, and your overnight message catch-up — in one tight briefing.
Brief reads your messages on your own devices. On the free plan the filter runs entirely on your Mac; on paid plans the candidate message goes to our AI provider for the judgment and is never stored. Only the extracted action syncs to your phone.
Here is what each plan costs.
The catch-and-review core, on your own devices.
Pro features, your tokens.
Better catching, and the full morning brief.
Everything, plus the daily content modules.
It reads them on your own Mac to find action items. On the free plan that judgment happens on your Mac and nothing leaves it. On paid plans Brief sends the candidate message and a few surrounding lines to its AI provider to catch more — used only for that one request, never stored by us, never used to train models. Either way only the extracted action and your routing decisions sync to your iPhone. We never sell or share your data. The details are in the privacy policy.
Your iMessage history lives in a local, protected database on your Mac (~/Library/Messages/chat.db). Full Disk Access is Apple's required — and only supported — way for an app to read it. You grant it once, in System Settings → Privacy & Security, and Brief walks you through it. Brief uses it to read Messages and nothing else, and the analysis happens on your Mac.
Because that's where the data is. iMessage history only exists on your Mac in a form an app can read, so the Mac app does the scanning. The iPhone app is where you actually review and route — which is where you are when you need it. Neither half is much use alone.
No. Scheduled scans are suppressed between 10 PM and 6 AM by default, so Brief isn't working — or notifying — while you're asleep. You can turn quiet hours off in settings if you want it running around the clock.
There are four plans: Free (100 actioned items per month, on-device filtering), Bring Your Own Key at $6.99/month for cloud filtering on your own API key, Pro at $16.99/month for cloud filtering on ours plus the full morning brief, and Premium at $24.99/month which adds the daily content modules. New subscribers get their first month of Premium free, and founding members get 50% off their first year with their invite code. Full breakdown here.
Through TestFlight, Apple's official beta tool — the download page walks you through both apps. The beta is capped at 100 testers.
Not today. Brief reads iMessage on macOS. If that's a dealbreaker for you, tell us at [email protected] — it's useful to know.