what happened to rewind ai? the timeline from 2022 to 2026

what happened to rewind ai, in short: the company renamed itself limitless in april 2024 and bet on a $99 pendant. meta acquired limitless, announced on december 5, 2025. the rewind mac app then lost all screen and audio capture on december 19, 2025, through an app update. pendant owners outside seven markets kept a free plan and support through 2026. people who used rewind for screen history had nowhere inside limitless to go.

this timeline is built from limitless's and rewind's own pages, many of them now only in the wayback machine, and it is current as of october 2026.

the rewind ai timeline, 2022 to 2026

rewind went from a local mac recorder to a sunset notice in a little over three years.

what was rewind ai?

rewind was a mac app that recorded your screen and audio and made all of it searchable. its 2022 homepage said every recording was stored locally on your mac, with only you able to reach it. its help center said it captured a frame every two seconds, compressed raw recordings up to 3,750x, and used about 14 gb a month for the average user (archived compression faq). later it added ask rewind, which answered questions from that archive.

the local promise lasted to the end. on december 3, 2025, two days before the announcement, rewind's pricing page still said recordings were stored locally on device, and offered a free plan with the line "access your data forever." rewind pro sat beside it at $19 a month billed yearly, a 34% saving on the $29 monthly price.

that local design matters for the ending. rewind's history sat in a folder on each user's mac, so the export question for rewind is a different one from the export question for limitless.

when did rewind become limitless?

limitless went live on april 15, 2024, as a new product rather than a rename of the mac app. the april 15, 2024 capture of limitless.ai offered a web app, a mac app, a windows app and a wearable pendant at a $99 preorder price, with data kept in what it called its confidential cloud.

rewind kept running beside it. rewind's help center said the two apps did not sync, that rewind pro included limitless pro, and that screen capture was not on the limitless roadmap. in that same article, archived in may 2025, it said "we have no plans of sunsetting rewind."

that is where the search phrase limitless formerly rewind comes from. same company and the same cofounder, dan siroker, but a product that recorded conversations instead of screens.

when did the rewind ai meta acquisition happen?

meta's purchase of limitless was announced on december 5, 2025, on limitless's own homepage. an archived copy from december 3 still sells a pendant and unlimited plan bundle for $299, marked down from $399. the copy captured late on december 5 is a note from dan siroker announcing the acquisition. 9to5mac reported the rewind shutdown the same day.

so what people call the rewind ai meta acquisition was meta buying limitless. the note says the team would help meta build ai wearables, and that everything except the pendant, rewind included, would be sunset. the page gives no deal terms.

what was discontinued, and when?

the rewind ai shut down happened in steps, and the dates differ by product and by country.

• pendant sales ended on december 5, 2025.
• the limitless service stopped on december 5, 2025 in brazil, china, the european union, israel, south korea, turkey and the united kingdom. users there had until december 19 to download their data, after which, limitless said, their accounts and data would be permanently deleted.
• the rewind mac app, in limitless's words: "the latest update disables all screen and audio capture starting december 19, 2025."
• limitless desktop and web apps can no longer record, but previously recorded meetings stay viewable throughout 2026 outside the seven markets.
• pendant support was first promised for at least another year, and the faq now says throughout 2026, outside the seven markets where the service closed.
• the rewind websites went too. rewind.ai redirected to limitless.ai by december 6, 2025. when we checked on october 21, 2026, help.rewind.ai did not resolve and rewind.ai showed an unrelated ai tools site.

so treat any "rewind download" you find today as untrusted.

what happened to rewind recordings and subscriptions?

subscriptions ended in the customer's favour. limitless says continuing customers no longer pay, and existing customers get the unlimited plan for free, a plan its pricing page listed at $348 a year in november 2025. to keep using the service, you had to accept the updated privacy policy and terms of service.

recordings split three ways, depending on where they lived.

limitless's export article lists transcripts, chats and audio files, and rewind's help center said the two apps did not sync. so don't expect your rewind screen history inside a limitless export. what you can still recover from a rewind folder, and how, is in how to export rewind ai data. the general pattern is in what happens to your data when an ai app shuts down.

where did former rewind users go?

we haven't found a public count of where rewind's users went, so the useful answer is by what they used it for.

1. pendant owners outside the seven markets could stay. the free unlimited plan and support run through 2026, which makes now the time to export. the options after that are in limitless pendant alternatives.
2. screen history users had to leave. limitless had said screen capture was not on its roadmap, and the december notice sunset everything but the pendant. on a mac that means a third party recorder such as remynd or screenpipe, which is source available under its own commercial licence and runs on macos, windows and linux.
3. people moving to windows can use microsoft recall. it needs a copilot+ pc or windows 11 ai+ pc with a 40 tops npu, 16 gb of ram and 256 gb of storage, keeps snapshots encrypted on the local drive, and saves nothing until you opt in.
4. meeting note users may only need a transcriber, which best rewind ai alternatives in 2026 covers.

what should you use now on a mac?

our verdict, and we build one of the options, so weigh it that way: pick by what you used rewind for, and favour tools that keep the archive on your own disk.

• use remynd if you want a searchable screen history on a mac again, with nothing to host yourself.
• use screenpipe if you want to read the source, also run it on windows or linux, and don't mind more setup.
• don't start with limitless. no new pendants are sold, and its own faq talks about support outside the seven markets in terms of 2026.
• use recall only if you are moving to a copilot+ or windows 11 ai+ pc anyway.

the detail is in remynd vs screenpipe, remynd vs limitless, remynd vs microsoft recall and the rewind ai alternatives page.

remynd keeps the archive on your mac

the lesson from december 2025 is about custody. rewind users who still have their folder have something; anything that lived only in a vendor's cloud runs on the vendor's calendar.

remynd records the windows on your screen except the ones you exclude, and reads text from the window you are working in using apple vision. recordings and the search index stay on your mac unless you turn on optional cloud sync, which encrypts recordings on your mac before upload. calls are transcribed on your mac with an mlx model, and search opens with control + space.

sign in, crash reports and usage analytics do reach the network, and a search phrased as a question sends only the words you typed, any filters, the date and your time zone to remynd's ai, never your history. the security page spells out the rest. what stays on your mac lives on your disk, so a vendor shutting down can't take it with them. it is free to download for apple silicon macs on macos 14 or later.

download remynd for mac and keep your history on your side of the line.