A Limitless alternative that no acquisition can switch off.

// the short version

What happened to Limitless

Limitless began life as Rewind, the Mac app that made "a search engine for your life" a real product category. In 2024 it pivoted to hardware: the Limitless Pendant, a wearable that recorded your conversations and summarized them through a cloud service.

On December 5, 2025, Meta acquired the company. Pendant sales ended that day. The service was discontinued in the EU, UK, Brazil, and several other regions, the old Rewind app was shut down, and existing Pendant owners were promised support for at least a year while the team joined Meta's Reality Labs.

The lesson isn't that Limitless was a bad product — it's that a memory kept in someone else's cloud is only yours until their plans change. If you're replacing it, that's the property to fix first.

// choosing a replacement

What to look for in a replacement

A tool that remembers your conversations and your work holds the most personal data you have. Four things worth insisting on.

• ✓
  No cloud dependency Limitless stored your conversations in its cloud — which is why an acquisition could shut the service off in whole regions overnight. A local-first tool keeps working no matter who buys whom.
• ✓
  No extra hardware A pendant captures what's said around you. Your Mac already sees your meetings, calls, documents, and browsing — software can remember all of it without another device to charge.
• ✓
  More than conversations Meeting transcripts are half the story. The other half is what was on screen: the doc you had open, the numbers you saw, the page you can't find again.
• ✓
  You control retention and deletion Keep history forever or auto-delete on a schedule, and delete any stretch of it in one click. Your record, your rules — enforced on your machine, not by a service.

// the field

Mnema vs Limitless vs Screenpipe

The core difference isn't features — it's where your memory lives and who can take it away.

Competitor details reflect public information as of July 2026 — check each project directly before deciding.

// questions

Frequently asked

What happened to Limitless?

Meta acquired Limitless on December 5, 2025. Pendant sales stopped the same day, the service was discontinued in the EU, UK, and several other regions, and the Rewind Mac app was shut down. Existing Pendant owners keep working service for at least a year, with the team folded into Meta's Reality Labs.

What is the best Limitless alternative?

It depends on what you used it for. If you want a private memory of your work — meetings, calls, documents, everything you saw and heard on your Mac — Mnema covers it on-device with no wearable and no cloud: transcription with speaker labels, timeline scrubbing, search, and ask-AI, encrypted at rest. If you specifically want a wearable for in-person conversations away from your desk, no Mac app replaces that.

Does Mnema record meetings like Limitless did?

Yes — Mnema records microphone and system audio on your Mac and transcribes it on-device with speaker labels, so calls and meetings become searchable alongside what was on screen at the time. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Does Mnema send my recordings to the cloud?

No. Capture, text extraction, transcription, and search all run on-device — there's no account, no servers, and no telemetry. The one exception is opt-in: you can use your own Deepgram account for higher-accuracy transcripts, and audio leaves your Mac only if you turn that on.