Which one should you actually use?

An extension reads the page you are looking at. It walks the conversation currently rendered in your browser, pulls the text out of the HTML, and reformats it. That means it can only ever see what your browser is showing: the thread you have open, scrolled as far as you have scrolled.

The official export is a file OpenAI builds server-side from your account. You request it in Settings, it arrives by email or SMS, and it contains the conversations and other account data OpenAI still stores — including archived conversations. It is a complete account snapshot rather than a transcription of what is on screen.

If your need is "save this one chat as a PDF before I close the tab," stop reading and install an extension. That is the right tool and this one is not.

• Instant. No waiting for an email. You click, you have the file.
• One conversation at a time. If you only want the thread you are in, a full account export is absurd overkill.
• Free. Many are genuinely free with no cap.
• No unzipping. The output lands in your downloads folder already readable.

• It is complete. Every conversation still stored on the account, not just the ones still in your sidebar and not just the part you scrolled to. Long threads are a common failure mode for extensions, because a conversation you have not scrolled through may not be fully in the DOM.
• It includes account assets. Images and files present in the archive come down with it. Extensions generally capture the text around them.
• It survives. Once downloaded, the ZIP works after an account is closed or cancelled, on a machine with no browser extension installed, in ten years. It is a file, not a plugin.
• It is not tied to the live UI. Extensions read the interface, so a UI change can break them overnight. A file format changes more slowly, and when it does the fix is ours to ship.
• No permissions. An export requires nothing installed. An extension asks to read and change your data on the site where your conversations live.

The official export has one genuine problem, and it is the reason this site exists.

What arrives is a ZIP containing conversations.json — every message on your account nested inside a tree of UUID keys, with branch pointers, null timestamps, and content split across internal types. It also ships a chat.html viewer, which renders as one enormous unnavigable page and cannot be imported anywhere.

Neither file is something you can comfortably read, search, or put in a notes app. The data is all there. It is just not in a form built for you.

We take the official export and turn it into the thing the extension gives you, without the compromises the extension makes: readable Markdown, an Obsidian vault, a searchable offline HTML archive, or PDF.

It runs in your browser. The file never leaves your device — no upload, no account, no extension. Every message in the source is either rendered into the output or listed in skipped.csv with a reason code, and the count is shown to you when it finishes. Nothing disappears quietly.