Earkeep vs Limitless and Rewind

If you want your hallway chats, your commute, and your lunch conversations captured, Earkeep can't do that, and nothing software-only on your device can. If what you actually want back is the part where your meetings are transcribed automatically, retroactively, without a bot and without typing notes, and you want the resulting archive to be yours in a way that can't be shut off by a company being acquired, Earkeep is built for exactly that.

Limitless started in 2020 as Rewind, a Mac app that continuously recorded your screen and audio, stored it locally, and made it searchable: "a search engine for your life." In 2024 the company rebranded to Limitless and pivoted to a $199 wearable pendant that recorded conversations all day and transcribed them in the cloud, calling the pendant "the superior approach." The Rewind Mac app went into maintenance mode as the architecture moved to a cloud-connected backend.

On December 5, 2025, Meta acquired Limitless to fuel its AI wearables and personal-superintelligence push. New pendant sales and new subscriptions stopped immediately. Existing customers were moved to the paid Unlimited plan for free, "for at least one year," under Meta's terms of service and privacy policy. On December 19, 2025, the Rewind Mac app's screen and audio recording was permanently disabled: a kill switch, not a graceful sunset. Service was terminated outright in seven regions, and users in the UK and South Korea reported their pendants simply stopping.

The reaction was immediate. Community reporting describes users' first response as asking for refunds and raising concerns about Meta's privacy reputation, and no refund program was announced for the Rewind shutdown. On r/RewindAI, the community that had already lived through the Rewind-to-Limitless pivot once, this was the second time the same base felt abandoned. One user summed up the first pivot months before the Meta news even landed: "we largely trusted them when they said 'we're shifting our focus from Rewind to Limitless because we believe it is the superior approach.' Now, a year later, I'm less confident… or that they were even thinking of us."

If you're one of the Rewind or Limitless users comparing options right now, the community's own migration criteria in r/RewindAI threads were local processing, no subscription, data you keep, and a meetings focus. Earkeep was built around exactly those requirements from the start, not retrofitted after the Meta news. There's no waitlist and no hardware to order: download the free trial and it's running on your device in minutes.

To be direct about scope, because honesty here is more useful than a sales pitch:

• Away-from-desk capture. The Limitless pendant recorded hallway conversations, lunches, and conferences, anywhere you wore it. Earkeep only captures what your device hears; there's no wearable and no mobile app.
• Rewind's screen recording. Rewind's original pitch included recording and OCR-ing everything on your screen. Earkeep is audio-only.
• Mobile and cross-device sync. Limitless shipped iOS and Android apps with sync across devices. Earkeep is a macOS desktop app only.
• Frontier-model chat over months of history. Limitless's cloud "Ask AI" ran large models over your whole recorded history on their servers. Earkeep's answer is bringing your own agent or MCP client to your local transcripts, which is powerful but more hands-on than a built-in cloud chat.

If any of those is the specific thing you miss most, Earkeep won't be a full substitute. If what you miss is the meetings, the "I never have to remember to hit record" part, that's the part Earkeep replaces, and keeps working.