The same pull. A better place to point it.
Distil Reads started from a simple frustration: the most useful things I saved to read later, I almost never read — while the feeds designed to waste my time got every spare minute.
Why it exists
We all have a someday-pile: the talk a friend swore by, the long essay we bookmarked at midnight, the tab that has been open for three weeks. It grows because the effort to actually read it never fits the moment we have. Meanwhile the endless feeds ask nothing of us and take everything — an hour gone, nothing learned.
Distil Reads is an attempt to steal that mechanism back. It rebuilds the exact feeling of an addictive feed — the swipe, the “just one more,” the ease of falling in — but points it at the real material you chose to keep. The only thing that changes is what you walk away with: instead of empty, a little sharper.
You already scroll for hours. The goal was never to make you scroll less — it was to make the scrolling count.
How it works, briefly
You capture a video or page in one click. An AI distills it into a card — a summary, the key points, and a full read written to fit the minutes you have. You tag it to an Occasion (Commute, Deep Work, Dinner) and it waits for the right moment. When you read, you highlight and note, and when you finish you tell the truth about whether it stuck — so the ones that didn’t come back until they do.
What we believe
Single-player by design
No followers, no comments, no performance. Just you and what you read.
Bring your own key
You run the AI on your own key. No subscription, no lock-in, no markup.
Your library is yours
Captures, highlights, and notes stay private — never a training set, never for sale.
Who’s behind it
Distil Reads is built and maintained by Phuoc Pham, based in Munich, Germany. It’s a focused, independent project — no ad model, no growth team, no incentive to keep you scrolling longer than is good for you. If you have a bug, an idea, or a disagreement, it reaches a real person: [email protected].