Getting your chats into Desk
Three things, in order: a key from Anthropic or OpenAI, an export from ChatGPT or Claude, and the import itself.
About ten minutes of actual work. The export arrives by email and can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, so start it early.
Step 1
Get an API key
Desk runs on your own key. You pay Anthropic or OpenAI directly for what you use — there is no Desk subscription in front of it, and no shared account you are sharing your reading with.
One key is enough. An Anthropic key runs Desk on Claude, an OpenAI key runs it on GPT; you can change it later. Both are pay-as-you-go, and both want a few dollars of credit on the account before the key will answer.
sk-ant-…- Sign in at console.anthropic.com, or create an account.
- Open Billing and add some credit — $5 is plenty to start.
- Open Settings → API keys → Create key, and copy it.
sk-…- Sign in at platform.openai.com, or create an account.
- Open Settings → Billing and add a payment method or credit.
- Open API keys → Create new secret key, and copy it.
Copy the key before you close the page. Both providers show it once and never again — if you lose it, you delete that key and make another one, which costs nothing.
Then paste it into Desk. On the phone or iPad, tap the account icon in the top right and choose “Get started”; on the web, Desk asks for it at “/setup” the first time you sign in. It is encrypted and stored server-side — it is never sent back to a browser or an app, and Desk never trains on anything you keep here.
Step 2
Export your chats
Both products will hand you your whole history as a zip. Ask for it first, then come back — the email takes as long as it takes.
- Settings → Data controls → Export data → Export.
- Wait for the email from OpenAI, then use its download link. The link expires after 24 hours.
- Open the zip. The file Desk wants is conversations.json.
- Settings → Privacy → Export data → Confirm export.
- Wait for the email from Anthropic, then use its download link.
- Open the zip. The file Desk wants is conversations.json.
Doing this on an iPhone or iPad? Save the zip from the email into Files (Downloads is fine), then tap it once — iOS unzips it into a folder beside it. Inside that folder is “conversations.json”, and that is what you will pick in the next step.
Step 3
Import it into Desk
Desk reads the export where it sits — on your phone or in your browser — and keeps the conversations, not the file.
On iPhone or iPad
- Tap the account icon in the top right, then “Import a history”. (On a brand-new account there is also a “Import Claude or ChatGPT History” card on the empty desk — same thing.)
- Tap “Choose a file…” and pick the “conversations.json” inside the folder you unzipped.
- Watch the count. A big history takes a few minutes, and you can leave the sheet and come back — it keeps going.
On the web
- Go to “deskapp.me/import” while signed in.
- Choose ChatGPT or Claude, then pick your “conversations.json”.
The export file never leaves your device. It is opened and read where you picked it, and what reaches Desk is the conversations inside it — the same thing Desk stores for a chat you have here. The zip itself is never uploaded.
What comes across, and what doesn’t
- The text of every conversation, with its title and its date, filed in one project per source.
- Not images, attachments, tool calls or reasoning traces. Desk counts what it had to leave behind and tells you the number.
- Importing again later is safe. Conversations are matched on the provider’s own id, so a bigger export next month updates what is here instead of making a second copy of everything.
Step 4
Read them for notes (optional)
The import itself is free. Reading what your history says about you is the part that spends your key.
After the import finishes, Desk offers to read the conversations and write notes from them — what you are working on, what you decided, what you keep coming back to. That is a model call per conversation on your own key, so it costs you real money, and Desk never starts it on its own: it happens when you press the button that says so.
It runs a few conversations at a time and tells you how many are left, so you can stop between batches and pick it up later. Nothing is read twice.