Blyven
A private, EU-hosted platform for families to record and preserve the voices of the people they love — before those voices are gone.
The problem we set out to solve
Most people realise too late that they never recorded their parents' or grandparents' voices. The stories, the jokes, the way someone used to say your name — when they're gone, they're gone. The tools that exist today are either expensive productions booked months in advance, generic cloud recorders with no sense of occasion, or notes apps that weren't built for something this personal.
Blyven exists because preserving a voice should be simple, private, and within reach before it feels urgent.
What we built
Blyven is a mobile-first platform for recording voice memories, organising them with gentle guided prompts, and sharing them with chosen family circles — with an option for optional, on-request transcription for people who prefer searchable text.
It runs on a European cloud footprint from end to end, ships as both a web app and a native iOS app, and supports both individual families and institutional accounts for hospices, senior residences and similar organisations.
The hard parts we solved
Recording that works when the connection doesn't
A hospice room, a holiday cottage, a grandparent's kitchen — these are the places people actually record. We built an offline-first recording flow that captures locally, queues reliably, and reconciles cleanly when the device comes back online.
European data residency, enforced at the infrastructure level
"Our data stays in the EU" is only true if the plumbing guarantees it. We locked storage, backups and encryption keys to European regions at the policy level so there's no path for a recording to leave — not even through an operator mistake.
Deletion that actually deletes
GDPR Article 17 says a user can demand erasure. Backups and replicas are usually where "delete" quietly becomes "soft delete." We designed the data model so a deletion request propagates through every store within a published window, with an audit trail we can defend.
Family sharing without a permissions nightmare
Some family members listen, some contribute, some shouldn't see the sensitive recordings at all. We modelled circles, invitations and roles so families can share without granting too much — and without needing to manage it like an enterprise team.
One product on phones, tablets, web and the App Store
Users arrive from every device. We built Blyven as a single codebase that ships as a fast web app and a native iOS app from the App Store, sharing recording, sync and playback logic — so we don't maintain three half-products.
A seat model for care facilities
Hospices and senior residences wanted team accounts that staff manage on behalf of residents. We added a B2B layer — seat-limited subscriptions, staff-managed member provisioning, and organisation-level billing — without complicating the consumer product.
The outcome
Blyven is live at blyven.com, available in multiple European languages, with consumer plans from a free tier through family-sized subscriptions, and a dedicated B2B track for care organisations. It's a product that has to earn trust with every recording — and so far, it does.
Building a product where privacy isn't optional?
Blyven is one of our own products — but the same engineering practice is what we bring to client work. If your product needs GDPR-grade data handling, European hosting, a mobile + web experience from one team, or a consumer-plus-B2B business model that doesn't collapse under its own weight, we'd like to hear about it.
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