How it works
A few minutes at a time, for as long as you like.
MemoBeads is not a memoir project you have to sit down and start. It is a habit that costs about as much attention as replying to a message, and it compounds.
Capture
Four ways in, all of them short.
Type it
The plainest route, and the one most people use most. A few sentences while the thought is there. Length allowances rise with your plan — from 300 characters on the free plan to 5,000 on Premium.
Say it
Record straight into the app. Voice is kept as audio and transcribed, so it stays searchable — and so the sound of you saying it survives, which is the part families ask for most. Up to 30 seconds on Lite, 2 minutes on Standard, 4 on Premium.
Show it
Add photos and say what they were. A photo with no story attached is exactly the problem MemoBeads exists to solve, so a Bead always wants a line of context alongside the image.
Film it — Premium
Short video clips, up to two of three minutes each per Bead. Video is deliberately kept to one plan: it is the one thing that genuinely costs money to store, and we would rather price it honestly than spread it thinly.
Deliberately absent: there is no bulk import that hoovers up your photo library. A vault of forty thousand unlabelled images is not a legacy, it is a hard drive. Personal media enters one Bead at a time, with you saying what it was.
Prompting
The vault notices what you have never talked about.
Left alone, everyone records the same twenty stories. The prompting is there to reach the other thousand.
Occasions
Anniversaries, birthdays, the date something happened. These are the moments a memory is already at the front of your mind, which is the cheapest possible time to ask for it.
Gaps
Your vault can see the shape of what it holds. If there are two hundred Beads about your career and none about your marriage, that is a question worth asking — once, and never nagging.
Life-story sequences
Structured runs of questions that walk through a period properly — childhood, first work, becoming a parent — drawn from how reminiscence work is actually done rather than invented from scratch.
Callbacks
An Aspiration Bead you recorded years ago comes back: you said this then — how do you feel about it now? The answer becomes its own Bead, and the pair is worth more than either alone.
Asking
Two different AIs, and they are kept apart on purpose.
One of them can see your memories. The other one cannot, ever. That separation is a security decision, not a packaging one.
The Vault Agent
Reads your Beads and answers from them. It is the only thing with access to your vault, and it is the only thing your family will ever talk to afterwards. Included on Lite, Standard and Premium.
The AI Assistant
An ordinary capable assistant for everyday questions — with no access to your vault at all. Included on Standard and Premium. It is there so that MemoBeads earns a place on your phone every day, not only on the sad days.
The rule
It answers from what you said, or it says it doesn't know.
Every answer traces back to specific Beads. Where your vault has to join two things you said in order to answer, it tells you that is what it is doing. Where it has nothing, it says so.
It will not extrapolate a personality, guess an opinion from a demographic, or produce something in your voice that you never put there. This holds on every plan, and it holds after you are gone — which is the only moment it really matters.
Connectors
A quiet layer of context, if you want one.
On Standard and Premium you can connect your email, calendar and contacts. They are not copied into your vault as memories — they sit underneath as context, so that when you say "the trip with Dan" your vault knows roughly when that was and who Dan is.
Included
Email (Gmail or Outlook), calendar (Google or Outlook) and contacts. Each one is opt-in individually, and each can be revoked without touching anything you have already recorded.
Optional add-on
Spotify, YouTube and social accounts as an enrichment bundle at $3.99 a month. These pull text, metadata and a link — never a duplicate copy of media that already lives somewhere else.
Never
Your photo library, your friends list, your private messages. Some of that is closed off by the platforms; the rest we have chosen not to want.
MBHighlights
Turn a stretch of your vault into something you can hold.
A written piece composed from your own Beads — one event, one year, or the whole of it. You buy each one when you want it rather than paying a monthly fee for a feature you use twice a year.
- Moments — $4.99. One event, one trip, one milestone.
- Chapters — $14.99. A year of your life, or a themed slice of it.
- Memoirs — $49.99. The whole vault, drawn together.
Standard and Premium. Composed by your Vault Agent from your Beads, and stored so you can download it again.
What MemoBeads is not
A short, honest list.
- Not a chatbot that pretends to be a dead person.
- Not a project-management, email-drafting, document-writing work tool.
- Not a photo backup. It is deliberately worse at that than the free thing already on your phone.
- Not a service that promises to keep your memories forever, because nobody can promise that honestly.
Early access
The best time to start was thirty years ago.
MemoBeads is being built now. Join the waitlist and we will write to you once — when there is something real to open.