'I Lost a Thread That Changed My Life. So I Built This.
Last March, I stumbled across a Twitter thread at 2 AM. Some anonymous founder was breaking down exactly how they went from zero to $10M ARR. Step by step. Mistakes included. The kind of raw, unfiltered advice you can't find in business books or any kind of books.
I bookmarked it. Went to bed.
Woke up the next morning ready to take notes.
Gone.
The account was suspended. Thread? Vanished. Weeks of someone's hard-earned wisdom, erased because Twitter (X) decided to pull the trigger on their account.
I spent an hour trying to find cached versions. Wayback Machine had nothing. Google cache was blank.
This happened to me three more times over the following months. A developer's thread on system design. A therapist's breakdown of attachment styles that actually made sense. A photographer explaining their entire editing workflow.
All gone.
I got tired of losing things that mattered to me.
The night I lost that founder's thread, I opened VS Code and started building. I'm a developer if the tools don't exist, you make them yourself.
The first version was ugly. It barely worked. But it did one thing: it grabbed every tweet in a thread and let me download it before Twitter could take it away.
I kept using it. Kept improving it. Added PDF export so I could read threads on my Kindle. Added HTML export for archiving on my hard drive. Added a screenshot button because sometimes you just need to grab something fast.
Six months later, Twitter Thread Saver exists. It's a Chrome extension. It works on Twitter and X. And it solves the problem that's been driving me insane since I joined the platform.
Here's what happens when you click the extension on a Twitter thread:
You pick how many tweets you want. Maybe the whole thing, maybe just the first 25. You choose.
- You hit PDF. Your browser's print dialog opens. You save it as a real PDF—not some janky HTML file pretending to be one. The formatting is clean. It looks like something you'd actually want to read.
- Or you hit HTML if you want a web file you can open anywhere, on any device, forever.
- Or you hit Screenshot if you're in a rush and just need to capture what's on screen right now.
- Or you hit Link to bookmark it inside the extension for later.
That's it. No account creation. No monthly subscription. No "sign up to unlock this feature" nonsense.
I've been running this in beta for the past few weeks. All features unlocked, completely free. I wanted real people using it before I charged anyone a dime.
The response surprised me.
People started emailing.
"Saved me when an account I followed got banned."
"Finally downloaded that startup thread I've been meaning to read for months."
"Why didn't this exist earlier?"
That last one stuck with me. Why didn't this exist earlier?
The technology isn't complicated. Chrome extensions have been around for over a decade. Twitter's been deleting content just as long.
I think the answer is that most people who could build something like this don't spend enough time on Twitter to feel the pain. And most people who feel the pain don't know how to build.
I happened to be both.
The extension is free right now. Install it, use it, see if it fits how you use Twitter.
If a thread matters to you, save it. Don't wait until tomorrow. Don't trust that it'll still be there.
Because it probably won't.
Chrome Web Store: Twitter Thread saver
If you find it useful, leave a review. That's how other people find tools like this. And if something's broken or you want a feature, email me directly at brianinesh@gmail.com. I read everything.
—Nesh