Timehop

Timehop is a New York-based consumer mobile application that aggregates a user's past photos, videos and social media posts and resurfaces them on the anniversary of the date they were originally created. Users connect accounts and storage services — reported sources include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Apple Photos, Google Photos, Dropbox, Flickr and Swarm — and the app assembles a daily feed of content from the same calendar day in prior years. The company describes the product as a daily time capsule.

Product features documented by the sources include Daily Memories (a feed of content from the same date in previous years), Then & Now comparisons between old and new photos, editing and sharing tools with captions, stickers and frames, and RetroVideo and nostalgic news content such as old commercials and historical events. In 2025 the company introduced Timehop+, a paid iOS tier offering an ad-free experience, a Timeskip function to revisit the prior day or preview the next day after 8pm, the ability to pause usage streaks, additional themes, icons and colors, watermark removal, and controls to reorder days and filter which content appears.

The app is free on iOS and Android. Timehop's published data disclosures state that it collects identifiers, connected social account content, regulatory preferences, protected-class characteristics such as country, gender, age and language, and device/network attributes, and that it does not sell personal identifiers, social account connections or memories, while sharing anonymized or aggregated demographic data with diagnostics and advertising partners.

Founding story

Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong, self-described Foursquare users, were working on a Craigslist replacement when they participated in Foursquare's first hackathon in February 2011. In eight hours they built 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, a product on the Foursquare API that surfaced a user's check-ins from a year earlier, inspired by the 'ghost' racer in Mario Kart. Daily emails from the product reportedly saw 70-80% open rates, and usage spread from about 20 hackathon participants — including Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, who later became an investor — to several thousand users. Within three months the founders abandoned the Craigslist project to work on the idea full time, later adding PastPost for Facebook statuses and eventually consolidating under the Timehop name.

Business model

Timehop operates a consumer mobile application distributed free on iOS and Android. Historically it was monetized through advertising: its data disclosures describe sharing anonymized and aggregated demographic and device information with advertising partners to serve contextualized ads, and it maintains GDPR opt-in and CCPA opt-out regulatory preference handling. It has since added Timehop+, a paid subscription tier on iOS that removes ads and unlocks additional features. In 2015 management stated the company was not focused on monetization, prioritizing growth and product development instead.

Advertising supported by anonymized and aggregated user demographic and device data, plus the Timehop+ consumer subscription on iOS that removes ads and adds premium features. One third-party profile characterizes the company's revenue as recurring/software and its current revenue as modest; no revenue figures are disclosed in the sources.

Traction

Reported user figures rose from 12 million users in January 2016 to over 20 million users as of March 2025. In April 2015 the company reported 15 million registered users with 7 million opening the app daily, and 19 employees. By 2014 the iOS app had passed one million downloads and ranked in the U.S. App Store Top 200, later reaching the top 50 and holding a top-100 position for about a year. Disclosed funding totals $14 million ($14.1 million per one source), with the last round in July 2014.

Latest developments

Timehop was acquired by Sincere Corporation in June 2023 and is described as part of the Sincere family of brands alongside Punchbowl, Lovebird and Memento. The company reported surpassing 20 million users as of March 2025, and its help center content was updated in June 2025. Its most recent product initiative is the Timehop+ paid subscription for iOS. Third-party data providers list a much smaller team than at the company's peak — approximately 6 employees (2-10 range) as of an August 2026 snapshot, versus 34 in a February 2024 snapshot and 19 employees in 2015.