DoneThat vs Perfect Memory

The short answer

Perfect Memory reads your screen with OCR, keeps the result encrypted on your own machine, and will sell you a one-time offline licence for $79 instead of a subscription. On Windows, for searchable recall, that is a strong offer.

It answers "what did I see, and what was said in that meeting?" DoneThat answers "where did my week go, and what should I change?" Both read a screen; the outputs are different products.

What Perfect Memory does well

OCR, not window titles. It reads the text visible on screen, so search finds what was actually there rather than which application was in focus. That is a meaningfully deeper record than most trackers produce.

Local and properly encrypted. BitLocker and AES-256 with Scrypt, with the cloud acting only as a relay for requests. That is a stronger storage position than ours.

Private browsing pauses recording automatically. A thoughtful default rather than a checkbox you have to discover.

You can buy it. A $79 one-time offline licence is rare in this category and worth taking seriously if you dislike renting software indefinitely.

A real free tier. 10 AI assists and 30 AI meetings a month, downloadable with no card and no account.

Meeting transcription across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack, Webex and WhatsApp — broader coverage than DoneThat offers.

Pricing

As of 11 August 2026:

Pro adds unlimited AI assists, transcripts and searches, plus access to multiple providers including Claude and ChatGPT.

The free tier's limits are low enough that regular use will push you to Pro, but they are generous enough to judge the product properly, which is the point of a free tier.

DoneThat is subscription-based with a 14-day free trial; current prices are on the DoneThat download page.

The archive question

Both products read the screen, and they store the results very differently.

Perfect Memory keeps the OCR text, encrypted, on your device. That is what makes search work, and it means a substantial searchable record of everything visible on your screen now lives on your machine — yours to secure, back up and eventually delete.

DoneThat keeps no screenshots at all. They are processed in real time and immediately deleted; only the derived structured activity persists. Excluded apps are redacted on your machine before anything is sent. With your own Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model, raw activity never reaches our servers. The desktop app is open source.

If your concern is a vendor holding your data, Perfect Memory's local encryption is the better answer. If it is that a detailed record of your screen should not exist anywhere, ours is.

Recall versus reconstruction

Perfect Memory is optimised for finding things: what did that document say, what was decided on the call, where did I see that number. It is good at that.

It is not measuring time. It will not tell you that nine hours went into a recurring meeting, that your stated priority received 15% of your attention, or that you have drifted three weeks running. DoneThat reconstructs the day into time you can act on, and Don reaches out during the work — nudging you onto goals, blocking calendar time, flagging low-value work while you can still fix it, checking your mood, reminding you of meetings, suggesting breaks.

Platform support

Where Perfect Memory is the better choice

• You are on Windows and staying there.
• Searchable recall is the requirement. OCR text search beats activity summaries for finding things.
• Meeting transcripts matter. Broader platform coverage than we offer.
• You want to buy, not subscribe. The $79 offline licence is a genuine alternative.
• You want a free tier to evaluate without a card.
• Local encryption is your priority.

Where DoneThat is the better choice

• You use macOS or Linux.
• You want to know where your time went. Perfect Memory does not measure it.
• You want coaching, not search.
• You want goals tracked and something that notices drift.
• You want AI tools to have your work history through MCP and an API.
• You do not want a screen archive to exist, even locally and encrypted.
• Your team wants shared signal without surveillance. Summary-level dashboards, relative trends rather than per-person hours, visibility set per summary, optional mood tracking.

How we compared these

Everything stated about Perfect Memory comes from its public site, read on 11 August 2026 and linked below. Claims about DoneThat are first-hand: we build it.

Perfect Memory has a free tier and a one-time licence where we have neither, its meeting-platform coverage is wider, and its local encryption is a stronger storage position than ours — all said plainly above.

Questions people ask about Perfect Memory

Is Perfect Memory free?

There is a free tier with 10 AI assists and 30 AI meetings per month, and you can download without a card or account. Pro is $15 per month billed yearly for unlimited use, and there is a $79 one-time offline licence if you would rather buy than subscribe.

Where does Perfect Memory store my data?

On your device, encrypted with BitLocker and AES-256 with Scrypt. The cloud acts only as a secure relay for requests. Recording also pauses automatically during private browser sessions.

Does Perfect Memory work on Mac?

No — it is Windows only as of 11 August 2026. DoneThat runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Perfect Memory vs DoneThat?

Perfect Memory if you want searchable local recall and meeting transcripts on Windows, especially with the one-time offline licence. DoneThat if you want your day reconstructed into time you can act on, coaching that reaches you during the work, and history other AI tools can query through MCP.