The Limitless Acquisition and What It Means for Your Data

By Adam Thede

On December 5, 2025, Meta announced they had acquired Limitless—the AI pendant company formerly known as Rewind. If you’re reading this, you probably know what that means. You’ve probably already gotten the email. You’ve probably already felt that familiar sinking feeling.

Another service you trusted is being absorbed into Big Tech. Another stream of your personal data is about to be redirected into someone else’s infrastructure. Another ritual of export, migration, and loss.

I know this feeling. I am a data refugee. I’ve lost data to Moves, Basis, Narrative, and Automatic. I watched each one die. I went through the motions each time—the frantic export, the orphaned files, the formats no other service could read.

And Limitless wasn’t abstract for me. I wore the pendant. I used it every day. When Meta announced the acquisition, I deleted my Limitless account and migrated to Omi within a week. I kept my Limitless Pendant hardware, paired it with the Omi app, and built a new API integration into Silo so my conversation data would keep flowing—just through a different pipe.

This is the sixth time I’ve gone through this. But it’s the first time I had somewhere to go. This post is about how you can too.

I

What Actually Happened

A timeline of the acquisition

December 5, 2025

Meta announces acquisition of Limitless. Rewind app (macOS screen recording) is immediately disabled. The pendant continues to function, but with a deadline.

December 19, 2025

Rewind app capture fully disabled. Users in the EU, UK, Brazil, China, Israel, South Korea, and Turkey are immediately cut off—the service simply stops working in those regions.

February 2026 — Now

The Limitless pendant still works for existing customers. Meta commits to “at least another year” of support. The Limitless API is still functional—this is the critical part most people don’t realize. You can still get an API key and pull your full conversation history.

~December 2026

Pendant support will likely end. The API will shut down. Your data will be… where, exactly? Meta hasn’t been clear about that.

II

Why This Keeps Happening

The venture capital physics

This isn’t Limitless’s fault. They built something genuinely useful—a pendant that captured conversations passively, transcribed them with AI, made them searchable. The product worked. People loved it.

But they raised venture capital. And venture capital has its own physics. You either grow fast enough to justify the investment, or you get sold. Those are the only two stable states.

Moves had 4 million downloads when Facebook acquired it. Basis was owned by Intel. Automatic was owned by SiriusXM. These weren’t failed products. They were successful products in a system that only cares about exponential growth.

The question isn’t “Will this service shut down?” The question is “What do I do before it does?”

III

What You Should Do Right Now

A practical migration guide

If you have a Limitless account with data you care about, here’s the practical checklist. (For a condensed version, see our migration guide.)

1. Get Your API Key (While You Still Can)

The Limitless API is the most underutilized escape route right now. Most people don’t even know it exists.

How to get your API key

  • Log into your Limitless account
  • Go to Settings → API Access
  • Generate a new API key if you don’t have one
  • Save it somewhere safe—treat it like a password

This API key lets you programmatically pull your entire conversation history, including transcripts, timestamps, participants, and metadata. It’s the richest export format available.

2. Export While the API Works

The API won’t last forever. You have a window—probably until December 2026—to get your data out in a structured, usable format.

Option A: Use Silo’s Limitless Integration

Full disclosure: I built Silo, and I’m writing this post to tell you it exists. But I’m not going to hide what it does or pretend it’s the only option.

Silo has a working Limitless integration. You give it your API key, and it pulls your full conversation history into your Silo account, synthesizes it with your other life data, and generates daily AI summaries that show patterns across all your sources.

Migration steps

  1. Create a Silo account
  2. Go to Settings → API Integrations → Limitless
  3. Paste your API key
  4. Click “Bulk Import Full History”
  5. Wait while Silo pulls everything (can take hours for years of data)

Option A+: Switch to Omi and Keep Capturing What I actually did

Here’s the part most “alternative to Limitless” posts won’t tell you: your Limitless Pendant hardware still works. You don’t need to throw it away.

I paired my Limitless Pendant with the Omi app the week of the acquisition. Omi is open-source, privacy-focused, and supports the Limitless Pendant hardware directly. My pendant is still clipped to my shirt every day—it just talks to different software now.

Then I built an Omi API integration into Silo. So here’s what my daily data flow looks like:

Pendant
Omi App
Silo
+
RescueTime, Wakatime, GitHub, Location

The conversation capture never stopped. It just changed pipes. And now it flows into a system I control.

Set up the same thing

  1. Download the Omi app and pair your Limitless Pendant
  2. Get an Omi developer API key (Settings → Developer → Create Key)
  3. Connect Omi in Silo (Settings → API Integrations → Omi)
  4. Run a bulk import to pull your Omi history
  5. Meanwhile, use the Limitless API (Option A) to archive your pre-migration history

Option B: Export It Yourself

If you’re technical and want full sovereignty over your data, I open-sourced the Python toolkit I built for exporting Limitless data:

adamthede/project-limitless-exporter

Downloads transcripts, raw audio (Ogg Opus), chat history, and Daily Insights. Exports to Markdown, JSON, and image formats. Supports incremental sync.

Your data, your storage, your format. No service dependency.

Option C: Wait for Export File Importers

If the API shuts down before you act, you’ll be left with whatever export format Limitless provides. Silo doesn’t have a Limitless ZIP importer yet, but it’s on the roadmap. This is the least certain option.

IV

What Silo Actually Is (And Isn’t)

Memory infrastructure, not a pendant replacement

Silo is not a Limitless replacement. It’s something broader.

If you’re looking for a new app to pair with your pendant, Omi is what I use—and what I’d recommend. If you want entirely new hardware, Fieldy is the other serious option.

Silo is the layer underneath. It’s memory infrastructure—a unified personal analytics platform where conversation data is one stream among many.

Omi

Conversations via pendant

Limitless

Historical conversation archive

RescueTime

Productivity patterns

Wakatime

Coding time & projects

GitHub

Development activity

Manual

Experiences, photos, people

Memory over metrics. Legacy over optimization. Permanence over growth. Your data is yours.

I built Silo because I got tired of losing my data to services that disappeared. I’ve used it every day for nine years. It’s been running longer than most of the services that have failed me. Learn more about why Silo exists →

V

Why I’m Not Worried About Silo Shutting Down

Different physics

I know what you’re thinking. “This guy is telling me to trust another service after Limitless just got acquired. Why wouldn’t Silo disappear too?”

Fair question.

I’m not raising venture capital.

Limitless raised $18 million. That money came with expectations. When you can’t meet those expectations, you get sold. I’m not playing that game. Silo is self-funded. You pay a monthly subscription, that subscription funds the infrastructure, and the service stays running.

I need it to exist.

This is my family’s tradition—documenting a life—translated into the language of my time. My great-grandparents wrote letters. My grandfather shot 8mm film. My father wrote weekly letters to his mother for decades. I use Silo every single day. My children will inherit this data.

If the worst happens, you’re protected.

If I can no longer maintain Silo, I will give you maximum notice and ensure your data is fully exportable in open formats.

VI

The Actual Alternative Products

Honest recommendations

If you want to keep using your Limitless Pendant:

Omi — This is what I use. Open-source app, pairs directly with Limitless Pendant hardware, privacy-first. Your pendant keeps working, just with different software. And Silo has a full Omi API integration, so the data flows straight through.

If you want entirely new hardware:

Fieldy — Wearable AI note-taker that clips to your clothing. Captures conversations hands-free with its own hardware.

If you want unified life tracking:

Silo pulls from Omi, Limitless, RescueTime, Wakatime, GitHub—all into one timeline. Gyroscope offers quantified self dashboards. Exist.io does automated tracking with mood correlation.

The combination I recommend (because it’s what I actually use)

Omi app + Limitless Pendant + Silo. The pendant captures conversations. Omi processes them. Silo archives them alongside everything else. No single point of failure. If Omi disappears tomorrow, my data is already in Silo.

VII

What I Actually Did

My migration, December 2025

Not hypothetically. This is my actual migration:

1

Got my Limitless API key. Connected it to Silo. Ran a bulk import of my full conversation history. Done in an afternoon.

2

Downloaded the Omi app. Paired my Limitless Pendant. Verified it was capturing and transcribing. Took about 15 minutes.

3

Built the Omi API integration into Silo. (This step took me a few weeks—but it’s built now, so you can skip to “paste your API key.”)

4

Deleted my Limitless account.

5

Life continued. The pendant is still on my shirt. The conversations still get transcribed. They flow into Silo alongside my RescueTime, Wakatime, GitHub, and location data. The AI generates daily summaries that weave it all together.

Nothing was lost. The pipe changed. The data persisted.

If I were you, I’d do the same thing—but faster, because the tools are already built.

VIII

What “Data Permanence” Actually Means

The problem isn’t that services die. Services will always die. Companies get acquired. Funding runs out. Priorities change.

The problem is that we treat our personal data like it’s disposable. We store our lives in services we don’t control, with export formats we can’t use, under terms we don’t read.

Data permanence doesn’t mean the service lives forever. It means your data survives the service.

That’s the test. Not “Will this company still exist in 10 years?” but “If this company disappears tomorrow, can I keep my data?”

If the answer is no, you’re renting your memories from someone who can evict you.

IX

A Letter to the Data Refugees

If you’re reading this because Limitless was the latest in a long line of services that let you down, I see you.

I know what it’s like to export data you can’t open. To watch another service shut down. To wonder if any of this is worth the effort.

It is worth it.

Not because you’ll use every piece of data. Not because future you will thank you. But because the act of paying attention to your own life—of noting what happened and who you were with and what mattered—makes you more present in the living of it.

My great-grandparents didn’t know their letters would survive a century. They were just writing to each other, trying to stay connected across distance. But those letters outlasted them. And now I hold them in my hands and feel, across a hundred years, that I know them.

You’re writing letters too. Digital ones. In conversation transcripts and location histories and photos with timestamps. They’re worth preserving. Not because they’re perfect. Because they’re yours.

The Limitless API is working right now. The pendant support extends to December 2026, probably. That’s the window.

Use it. Export your data. Put it somewhere you control. Try Silo if the unified life tracking approach resonates. Try something else if it doesn’t. Build your own system if you’re technical.

But don’t wait. The window will close.

I built Silo because I needed it to exist. I’m offering it to you because you might need it too.

Your data is yours. Make sure it stays that way.

Adam Thede is the founder of Silo, a personal life documentation platform. He has been building tools to capture and preserve personal data since 2016, after losing years of life data to service shutdowns. He is a data refugee and an archivist, continuing a four-generation family tradition of life documentation.

Practical Resources

Get your Limitless API key

limitless.ai → Settings → API Access

Keep your pendant alive with Omi

omi.me (pairs with Limitless Pendant)

Alternative pendant hardware

fieldy.ai
Closed Alpha

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