It remembers what you did, not just what you thought to write down. All of it stays on your Mac. None of it is ever uploaded.
Claude is good. It simply was not there for any of it. Memoir quietly hands it your own record, read only, from your own machine. The answer stops being an apology and starts being a memory.
Considered lack of access to past activity
I don't have access to your previous conversations or activity. If you tell me what she said, I'm happy to help you think it through.
She has brought it up three times this year. In February she said she would not decide before the spring. In May she said the garden was the part she would miss. Three weeks ago she told you she had started clearing the loft.
Every line of that answer points back to where it came from, which app and which day. Memoir opens its database read only, so anything you connect can read your memory and can never change a word of it.
100% private. It never leaves your Mac.
It can see that you opened the listings again at eleven at night. It will never know how that felt. So there is a journal, and what you write there outranks anything it worked out on its own.
Went back to the listings again tonight. I know what this is. It is not the flat, it is that I still have not decided whether I am staying.
Two hours and ten minutes on property listings, between 21:40 and 23:50. The third evening this month.
A journal knows what you wrote. Memoir knows the day around it. Side by side for a few years, they are something neither could be alone.
A few weeks in, it is useful. A few years in, it starts noticing things about you that you had stopped noticing yourself.
The ontology finally clicked over coffee — entities aren't the hard part, the edges between them are.Tuesday 9 July 2019 · 7 years ago
Harbour finally merged clean. Three weeks of
conflicts and the fix was one line in the wrong
file.
Add more to today, or hold the mic…
Over coffee on a Tuesday in July 2019. You wrote that the entities were never the hard part — the edges between them were — and came back to the same thought twice that autumn.
The four screens, drawn here rather than photographed. Everything in them is invented — a real screenshot would be a picture of somebody's actual memory.
You told Marco you would read his draft. Three weeks ago.
Your mother has brought up the house three times this year. None of it was written down.
Every autumn you start looking at flats in the same neighbourhood.
Everyone in this space remembers the last few weeks. The differences that matter are what gets taken from you, and how long it can be kept.
| Memoir | screenpipe | mem0 | Obsidian | Model memory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it takes | Words on screen | Screen, screenshots, microphone, keystrokes | Nothing. You feed it | Nothing. You type it | What you say in the chat |
| Who does the work | Nobody. It just watches | Nobody. It just watches | You | You | You |
| Where it lives | Your Mac, encrypted | Your Mac by default | Your server, or theirs | Your Mac | Their servers |
| A month of it | About 125 MB, fully indexed | About 30 GB (their figure) | — | — | — |
| Ten years of it | About 15 GB | About 3.6 TB at that rate | — | — | — |
| Shows you its sources | On every answer | Search finds the frame | No | The note itself | No |
| Can an agent change it | Never. It can only suggest | — | Yes | Yes | Yes |
To be fair about it: screenpipe sees a great deal more than we do. Pictures and sound catch the video call, the diagram, the thing said out loud and never written down. Those are real gaps in what Memoir can know, and they are the price of not taking them. It runs on Windows and Linux too, and we do not.
Every one of these is checkable. The code is open, and the behaviour each answer describes has a test with a number, so you do not have to take our word for any of it.
No. There is no screen recording code in the project at all, and no screenshots. Your Mac already publishes the words in your windows so that screen readers can speak them aloud, and those words are what Memoir reads. It also knows which app is in front and whether you have walked away. Nothing else.
Never captured. Open an incognito or private window in any browser and nothing from it is written down, in any language. An ordinary window that happens to have the word private in its title is unaffected, which is the sort of thing that only turns up if somebody bothered to test it.
Password managers, Keychain Access and the credential prompts your Mac shows you are skipped before anything is read, rather than filtered out afterwards. Secure text fields, the ones that show dots instead of letters, are never read and never even looked inside. You can add any other app to the list yourself.
Your memory sits inside a container that macOS encrypts with AES-256, and the key lives in your login keychain. A stolen laptop, a copied file or a leaked backup is unreadable without it.
It is worth being straight about the limit. Encryption protects the file, not the moment. While you are logged in and using Memoir the memory is unlocked, because you are using it. Anything already running as you could read it, exactly as it could read your email.
Very little, because it only keeps words. A capture is about 10.7 KB on disk once it is indexed, which works out at roughly 125 MB a month. Ten years of it comes to about 15 GB, which is why nothing is deleted unless you ask for it. If you would rather it forgot, you can set a window in Settings and anything older than that goes for good.
There is nothing for us to see. No account, no sign-in, no server, no analytics, no crash reports. The only thing that ever leaves on its own is a request asking whether a newer version exists, and it carries nothing about you, not even which version is asking. You can turn that off too.
Yes, and properly. Delete everything empties every table, clears the search indexes, removes the backups taken before upgrades, and shrinks the file rather than leaving the space allocated. If any part of that cannot finish, it tells you it failed instead of telling you it worked.
Your memory is a SQLite file on your own disk and the code is open under the MIT licence, so it cannot be switched off from somewhere else. You can also export the whole thing at any time, every entry and the evidence behind it, in a plain format that does not need us to read it.
This is not a hypothetical worry. The closest thing anyone built to this was bought and switched off in December 2025, and everybody using it lost what it held.
It reads when something changes on screen rather than on a timer, and it stops completely while you are away from the keyboard. We have not published a measured figure for what that costs yet, so we are not going to put a number here that we cannot stand behind. When we have measured it properly, it will be in the repository with everything else.
There is nothing to sign up for and nobody to tell. It begins remembering the day you install it, which is the best argument for installing it now rather than later.
Drag it to Applications and open it. It lives in the notch, with no dock icon and no window in your way.
Accessibility, so it can read the words your apps already publish. It starts the moment you say yes.
Read your contacts and calendar once and your memory starts years deep instead of empty. Or skip it, and let today be day one.
Free, and free forever. macOS 15 or later, on Apple silicon.