Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I’m Soren, co-founder of Crosshatch. We’re thrilled to share what we’ve been building.
What is Crosshatch?
Crosshatch is the API for complete, real-time user context. It lets users securely bring their habits, behaviors, and preferences to your app—in as little as a single tap.
Why did we build this?
AI-driven personalization is fundamentally broken. Apps don't know who we truly are, what matters to us, or how to adapt to our changing needs.
To compensate, apps and agents push us through long onboarding flows that are tldr and still fail at real personalization. This results in experiences that feel generic, invasive, or just plain wrong.
We asked ourselves: Instead of apps tracking us, what if we could bring our own context and AI? With just four lines of code, Crosshatch enables apps to instantly access complete, real-time user context—delivering personalization that feels intuitive, not intrusive.
What makes Crosshatch different?
🚀 Real-time adaptive personalization: Unlike CDPs or memory layers, Crosshatch dynamically updates based on user activity from across all connected apps. Apps can subscribe via webhooks, making personalization genuinely adaptive in near real-time.
🔐 User-driven privacy: Inspired by Apple-style permissions, users control exactly when, how, and for what purpose data is shared—either “while using” or “always.”
💡 Zero-friction developer experience: Just one simple AI API call delivers instant, permissioned user context, transformed by top LLM models.
What’s next?
We're laser-focused on empowering developers to build the next generation of AI-driven, hyper-personalized apps. If you’re working in AI, consumer tech, or personalization, we’d love to connect!
Yes – you can think of Crosshatch as similar to "Continue with Google," but when users sign in with Crosshatch, apps gain access to their personal AI with complete context. Our Link follows standard OAuth 2.0 - you can see more in our docs.
I think the core difference between standard OAuth and Crosshatch is that Crosshatch unlocks access to data and AI resources we manage on behalf of users, whereas, of course, Auth0 is focused on identity and access for applications' backends alone.
looks like a useful b2c utility! gotta be honest, still trying to understand the use cases here. so the user comes to my product and if i have crosshatch, they can connect other profiles and apps and personalize 'my app' based on other outside apps? and we can then use that in our onboarding?
btw really like your brand design! from logo to fonts - everything is super on point.
@andrew_white_13 Thanks for the kind words on our branding—we really appreciate it!
Exactly right. Think of Crosshatch like "Continue with Google" or "Continue with Apple." When users choose "Continue with Crosshatch," they securely connect profiles from other apps to yours. Our API then gives you instant access to this rich context, so you can immediately personalize your app, streamline onboarding, and provide experiences aligned with their existing behaviors and preferences.
@srnlrsn very cool. do you think the same could work for b2b? eg getting the tech stacks and preferences from those platforms? like creating a slack channel or connecting google analytics.
So far we've focused on consumer because consumers don't usually have compute to unify their data, whereas businesses often do. Consumers can benefit from having someone administer a 'personal AI' on their behalf, whereas a business might do it themselves.
For internal business use cases, we're very excited about Anthropic's MCP, which enables business users to connect AI like Claude to all their internal data. It turns out Claude is very good at pulling in context + taking action all just from chat! Crosshatch came first, but Crosshatch is essentially a variant of MCP.
We're deploying with a few apps now – no early stats to share yet!
Crosshatch works like Plaid – users can link their data in a few taps. We're working hard to make adding Crosshatch simple e.g., with our Playground or adding our complete docs to Claude and having Claude write integrations.
The idea of empowering users with control over their data and integrating real-time updates is a big step for creating more intuitive app experiences. I’m curious about the kinds of apps and features developers might build using Crosshatch's capabilities.
Congrats on the launch! Best wishes and sending lots of wins :) @srnlrsn
We're especially excited about applications in travel, retail, and logistics—areas where context can directly save users both time and money. For example:
Travel: Apps that dynamically recommend new destinations based on past trips and travel styles.
Retail: Experiences tailored from cross-retailer purchase history to streamline shopping and personalize product recommendations and search.
Logistics: Intelligent assistants that leverage users' schedules and tasks to proactively take helpful actions.
Broadly, we think context is the missing piece in AI—personalized agents can't truly save us time without deeply understanding our preferences.
Would love your thoughts or hear about any other use cases you're excited about!
I'm really excited about Crosshatch's streamlined development experience. The ability to integrate such powerful functionality with just four lines of code significantly reduces development costs and time. Moreover, the real-time, dynamic personalization sounds amazing. It will allow apps to adapt to users' changing needs, instead of requiring users to constantly adjust settings manually.
However, I'm a bit concerned about data security. While you emphasize user-driven privacy controls, ensuring data is not leaked or misused during transmission and storage is a critical issue for both users and developers. I hope you can provide more detailed explanations and guarantees on security.
If you can address these concerns, I believe Crosshatch will become a favorite among developers!
@xenia1234 Thanks very much for your thoughtful note!
Security and privacy are foundational to Crosshatch. You can read more about our detailed security practices in our docs, but to quickly summarize, here are the four key ways we protect user data:
AI-mediated access: Applications never directly receive a copy of user data. Instead, applications access insights from data through private AI we administer on behalf of users. This enables applications to use your context as needed in the application, without having to make a copy of it. For example, a travel app could learn about your preferred hotel types without directly accessing your past reservations.
Audited access logs: We maintain detailed logs of all API requests to ensure data is only accessed for the specific purposes approved by users when users Link data.
Fine-grained access controls: Crosshatch proactively filters sensitive information keeping only context relevant to personalization like purchase confirmations or reservations. We plan to expand our permissioning so that users can precisely control what data categories—like "recent purchases" or "recent workouts"—are shared, ensuring transparency and intuitive user control.
Time-bound access: Our API tokens have a limited lifespan, enabling Apple-style permissions ("while using" or "always") for the open web. Fwiw I think we're among the first to ship this level of control on the web.
If you have more questions or want to explore any of these points in greater depth, please let me know—I'm happy to chat more!
@srnlrsn Got it! Thanks for the explanation and as the app has access to your personal data it will be much more personalized than anything out there. Correct?
Bringing real-time user context into our product could take personalization to the next level. Would love to explore how we might integrate it! Congrats on the launch and best of luck today 🚀
This is amazing, Soren! Crosshatch is going to revolutionize personalization. The idea of user-driven privacy and real-time updates is just what we need in today’s app ecosystem. Can’t wait to see the impact! Congratulations!
This sounds like a really smart way to fix the messy state of app personalization! I’m curious—if different apps send conflicting data about a user’s preferences, how does Crosshatch decide what to prioritize?
Today, Crosshatch focuses specifically on actions users have taken across different apps, such as:
Purchases
Reservations
Exercise activities
Sleep patterns
This approach ensures that the linked data remains a factual, unified log of user actions without subjective interpretation. Developers using our API have the flexibility to determine how they want to utilize and interpret these data points to best fit their specific app's personalization needs.
Congrats on the launch, Soren and team! Crosshatch sounds like a game-changer for AI-driven personalization. Love the idea of users controlling their own data and the simplicity for developers. Looking forward to seeing what people build with it!
Personalization that actually adapts in real-time instead of relying on outdated tracking methods? This is exactly the kind of shift user-first apps need.
The idea of bringing our own context rather than having apps constantly track and guess is such a refreshing take. Excited to see how developers integrate Crosshatch!
Replies
Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I’m Soren, co-founder of Crosshatch. We’re thrilled to share what we’ve been building.
What is Crosshatch?
Crosshatch is the API for complete, real-time user context. It lets users securely bring their habits, behaviors, and preferences to your app—in as little as a single tap.
Why did we build this?
AI-driven personalization is fundamentally broken. Apps don't know who we truly are, what matters to us, or how to adapt to our changing needs.
To compensate, apps and agents push us through long onboarding flows that are tldr and still fail at real personalization. This results in experiences that feel generic, invasive, or just plain wrong.
We asked ourselves: Instead of apps tracking us, what if we could bring our own context and AI? With just four lines of code, Crosshatch enables apps to instantly access complete, real-time user context—delivering personalization that feels intuitive, not intrusive.
What makes Crosshatch different?
🚀 Real-time adaptive personalization: Unlike CDPs or memory layers, Crosshatch dynamically updates based on user activity from across all connected apps. Apps can subscribe via webhooks, making personalization genuinely adaptive in near real-time.
🔐 User-driven privacy: Inspired by Apple-style permissions, users control exactly when, how, and for what purpose data is shared—either “while using” or “always.”
💡 Zero-friction developer experience: Just one simple AI API call delivers instant, permissioned user context, transformed by top LLM models.
What’s next?
We're laser-focused on empowering developers to build the next generation of AI-driven, hyper-personalized apps. If you’re working in AI, consumer tech, or personalization, we’d love to connect!
🔗 Try Crosshatch today: playground.crosshatch.io | docs.crosshatch.io | Follow us on @getcrosshatch or @hypersoren.
Excited to hear your thoughts—What would you build with Crosshatch? What questions do you have? Let’s chat below!
@_seandavid 🙏🙏
Depict
@john_tans Thanks!!
Yes – you can think of Crosshatch as similar to "Continue with Google," but when users sign in with Crosshatch, apps gain access to their personal AI with complete context. Our Link follows standard OAuth 2.0 - you can see more in our docs.
I think the core difference between standard OAuth and Crosshatch is that Crosshatch unlocks access to data and AI resources we manage on behalf of users, whereas, of course, Auth0 is focused on identity and access for applications' backends alone.
looks like a useful b2c utility! gotta be honest, still trying to understand the use cases here. so the user comes to my product and if i have crosshatch, they can connect other profiles and apps and personalize 'my app' based on other outside apps? and we can then use that in our onboarding?
btw really like your brand design! from logo to fonts - everything is super on point.
@andrew_white_13 Thanks for the kind words on our branding—we really appreciate it!
Exactly right. Think of Crosshatch like "Continue with Google" or "Continue with Apple." When users choose "Continue with Crosshatch," they securely connect profiles from other apps to yours. Our API then gives you instant access to this rich context, so you can immediately personalize your app, streamline onboarding, and provide experiences aligned with their existing behaviors and preferences.
@andrew_white_13 Definitely!
So far we've focused on consumer because consumers don't usually have compute to unify their data, whereas businesses often do. Consumers can benefit from having someone administer a 'personal AI' on their behalf, whereas a business might do it themselves.
For internal business use cases, we're very excited about Anthropic's MCP, which enables business users to connect AI like Claude to all their internal data. It turns out Claude is very good at pulling in context + taking action all just from chat! Crosshatch came first, but Crosshatch is essentially a variant of MCP.
Really novel and powerful idea! Do you have any high level stats on the size of your userbase?
This might be helpful for app developers to gauge if it's worth the time investment to integrate w/ Crosshatch.
@tleyden Thanks for your note!
We're deploying with a few apps now – no early stats to share yet!
Crosshatch works like Plaid – users can link their data in a few taps. We're working hard to make adding Crosshatch simple e.g., with our Playground or adding our complete docs to Claude and having Claude write integrations.
@srnlrsn Tag line idea for you: "Plaid for user data" - inspired by @rajiv_ayyangar :-)
@rajiv_ayyangar @tleyden 👀👀
Shram
The idea of empowering users with control over their data and integrating real-time updates is a big step for creating more intuitive app experiences. I’m curious about the kinds of apps and features developers might build using Crosshatch's capabilities.
Congrats on the launch! Best wishes and sending lots of wins :) @srnlrsn
@whatshivamdo Thanks so much for your note!
We're especially excited about applications in travel, retail, and logistics—areas where context can directly save users both time and money. For example:
Travel: Apps that dynamically recommend new destinations based on past trips and travel styles.
Retail: Experiences tailored from cross-retailer purchase history to streamline shopping and personalize product recommendations and search.
Logistics: Intelligent assistants that leverage users' schedules and tasks to proactively take helpful actions.
Broadly, we think context is the missing piece in AI—personalized agents can't truly save us time without deeply understanding our preferences.
Would love your thoughts or hear about any other use cases you're excited about!
I'm really excited about Crosshatch's streamlined development experience. The ability to integrate such powerful functionality with just four lines of code significantly reduces development costs and time. Moreover, the real-time, dynamic personalization sounds amazing. It will allow apps to adapt to users' changing needs, instead of requiring users to constantly adjust settings manually.
However, I'm a bit concerned about data security. While you emphasize user-driven privacy controls, ensuring data is not leaked or misused during transmission and storage is a critical issue for both users and developers. I hope you can provide more detailed explanations and guarantees on security.
If you can address these concerns, I believe Crosshatch will become a favorite among developers!
@xenia1234 Thanks very much for your thoughtful note!
Security and privacy are foundational to Crosshatch. You can read more about our detailed security practices in our docs, but to quickly summarize, here are the four key ways we protect user data:
AI-mediated access: Applications never directly receive a copy of user data. Instead, applications access insights from data through private AI we administer on behalf of users. This enables applications to use your context as needed in the application, without having to make a copy of it. For example, a travel app could learn about your preferred hotel types without directly accessing your past reservations.
Audited access logs: We maintain detailed logs of all API requests to ensure data is only accessed for the specific purposes approved by users when users Link data.
Fine-grained access controls: Crosshatch proactively filters sensitive information keeping only context relevant to personalization like purchase confirmations or reservations. We plan to expand our permissioning so that users can precisely control what data categories—like "recent purchases" or "recent workouts"—are shared, ensuring transparency and intuitive user control.
Time-bound access: Our API tokens have a limited lifespan, enabling Apple-style permissions ("while using" or "always") for the open web. Fwiw I think we're among the first to ship this level of control on the web.
If you have more questions or want to explore any of these points in greater depth, please let me know—I'm happy to chat more!
Does the Crosshatch help, for example, to avoid sending push notifications to users during meetings or gym classes (as indicated on Google Calendar)?
@michael_vavilov Yes it could!
@srnlrsn perfect! All the best with your launch!
PLG OS
Cool launch. I am still trying to understand the top problems it will solve in my day to day life!
@richexplorer We see top applications as:
save time finding products / planning a trip
have apps adjust their settings based on your complete context (e.g., food delivery knows when you're traveling)
get inspired by new products / places you didn't know to search for
PLG OS
@srnlrsn Got it! Thanks for the explanation and as the app has access to your personal data it will be much more personalized than anything out there. Correct?
@richexplorer Exactly! :-)
Hey Soren! 👋 We’re also launching today with Velada Genius — an AI-powered restaurant recommendation tool — and Crosshatch sounds super interesting for us.
Bringing real-time user context into our product could take personalization to the next level. Would love to explore how we might integrate it! Congrats on the launch and best of luck today 🚀
@david_martin_suarez Super cool! Let's do it – I'm at soren@crosshatch.io if you want to chat!!
Crosshatch seems like a powerful tool for seamless, real-time user personalization! Congrats on the launch!
@mikita_aliaksandrovich Thanks!!
This sounds useful - but it sounds like developer-speak.
@digiwise Ack. Appreciate this feedback!!
Will continue to iterate here.
@srnlrsn well, I might not be your target market / ICP -
if it's developers, then keep on keepin' on....
if not, then adjustments are necessary
@digiwise for marketers or PMSs would very much welcome any suggestions!!
Spiritory
This is amazing, Soren! Crosshatch is going to revolutionize personalization. The idea of user-driven privacy and real-time updates is just what we need in today’s app ecosystem. Can’t wait to see the impact! Congratulations!
@andy_wong4 Thanks Andy!!
We're excited too – we imagine an internet of applications that adapt to our tastes and preferences, all automatically!
Fable Wizard
This sounds like a really smart way to fix the messy state of app personalization! I’m curious—if different apps send conflicting data about a user’s preferences, how does Crosshatch decide what to prioritize?
@jonurbonas Thanks, Jonas!
Today, Crosshatch focuses specifically on actions users have taken across different apps, such as:
Purchases
Reservations
Exercise activities
Sleep patterns
This approach ensures that the linked data remains a factual, unified log of user actions without subjective interpretation. Developers using our API have the flexibility to determine how they want to utilize and interpret these data points to best fit their specific app's personalization needs.
Happy to share more / you can see more on how our Context Layer works in our docs.
Lancepilot
Congrats on the launch, Soren and team! Crosshatch sounds like a game-changer for AI-driven personalization. Love the idea of users controlling their own data and the simplicity for developers. Looking forward to seeing what people build with it!
@odeth_negapatan1 🙏🙏
Personalization that actually adapts in real-time instead of relying on outdated tracking methods? This is exactly the kind of shift user-first apps need.
@marianna_tymchuk 🥰 Agreed!!
We're very excited for a future when applications adapt to us dynamically!
The idea of bringing our own context rather than having apps constantly track and guess is such a refreshing take. Excited to see how developers integrate Crosshatch!
All the very best to team Crosshatch !
@themisty Thank you!!
Seamless user context sounds great for personalization! How do you balance convenience with data privacy and security?
Continuing with the cross hatch... that's really cool and fascinating! Impressive. Congrats on the launch !🎉