The “Today” view: a handful of people to say hey to, each with the reason it resurfaced them and a jump back to the actual thread.

Say hey reads the enormous archive of iMessages already sitting on your Mac and, without any of it leaving the machine, hands you a short daily list of the relationships you’re quietly letting lapse — and the specific loose ends inside them.

The premise is a relationship CRM that you don’t have to feed. Every follow-up tool wants you to log the contact, tag the promise, set the reminder; Say hey instead reads what you’ve already typed. The find framed it as “people you’ve drifted from,” which undersells it: the app actually watches six kinds of signal — promises you made, questions someone left on read, things people owe you, plans with a date attached, birthdays and anniversaries, and, yes, people who’ve simply gone quiet. Each morning it distills those into a handful of prompts with a one-line “why now,” so the list is a set of concrete re-openings rather than a guilt-inducing address book.

The cleverest part is the query box. You can ask it plain-English questions — “what did I promise Dana about the offsite?” — and it answers with tappable citations back to the exact message in the thread, so you’re never trusting a summary you can’t check. A menu-bar quick view keeps the day’s list one click away, and an “inner circle” lets you weight the people you actually mean to keep up with above the noise.

What makes it worth a look over the pile of contact-nudger apps is the architecture. The store copy is unusually blunt about it: your messages never leave your Mac — no cloud, no account, no servers, and even the AI runs locally. For a category that normally means uploading your entire social graph to someone’s server, an app that does the same job while being built so it can’t phone your conversations home is a genuinely different proposition. (To be precise: the only thing it reports at all is anonymous diagnostics; your messages themselves are never collected or linked to you.)

The honest caveat is maturity. This is a brand-new app — version 0.0.2, a couple of weeks old, with no user reviews yet — so it’s an early bet on a good idea rather than a proven, battle-tested tool, and the pre-1.0 versioning is a fair warning to wait if you want polish. It’s Mac-only (macOS 14 or later) and a $19.99 one-time purchase. But the idea underneath it — a follow-up assistant principled enough to keep your messages on your own machine — is the rare one worth betting early on.