DoneThat vs Rewind

Rewind AI no longer exists

If you are here to compare Rewind against something, the comparison has already been settled by events.

Rewind rebranded to Limitless in 2024. Meta acquired the company in December 2025. The app stopped recording on 19 December 2025 — the final software update functioned as a kill switch, permanently disabling screen and audio capture. The Mac, Windows and iOS apps are no longer available to download, and Meta stopped selling the Pendant, with support for existing devices winding down through 2026.

One further thing that confuses people: the rewind.ai domain now hosts an unrelated AI tools site with no connection to the original product. Whatever you find at that address today tells you nothing about what Rewind was.

What Rewind was, and why people miss it

Worth saying properly, because it earned it. Rewind did continuous screen and audio recall on the Mac before the category had a name. It stored recordings locally, which was a genuine differentiator when almost everything comparable was cloud-first. The Pendant extended capture past the desk in a way no software-only tool matched.

If you used it and liked it, you are not looking for a lesser version of something. You are looking for a replacement for a product that was ahead of its market and got bought out of existence.

Choosing a replacement: what did you actually use it for?

This is the question that decides where you should go, and the answer is different for different people. We build one of the options below and will say so where it applies.

If you wanted raw, local, continuous recall — everything you saw, searchable. Screenpipe is the closest successor: open source, local-first, continuous capture. It is the honest recommendation for someone whose requirement is literally "Rewind, but it still exists".

If you are on Windows and want built-in recall. Microsoft Recall ships with the operating system on supported hardware. It is narrower than Rewind was, and it is Windows-only, but it costs nothing extra.

If what you actually valued was understanding your work, not replaying it. That is where DoneThat fits. It is not a replay tool. It reconstructs what you worked on into a reviewable day, coaches you against your goals, and exposes that history to AI assistants through an API and an MCP server.

The distinction matters. Rewind's model was record everything, search it later. DoneThat's is understand the work, then act on it. If you spent most of your Rewind time searching for a specific thing you saw three weeks ago, a recall tool is what you want. If you spent it trying to work out where your time went, a recall tool was always an awkward fit for that job.

The lesson worth taking from the shutdown

A kill switch in a software update is the clearest possible argument for caring about two things that sound abstract until they matter.

Where the data lives. Rewind's local-first storage is the reason its users still have anything at all.

Whether you can get it out. Migration is only possible if export is a real feature rather than a checkbox.

For what it is worth, DoneThat's answers: screenshots are never stored — processed in real time, deleted immediately, only the derived structured activity persists. Apps you exclude are redacted on your machine before anything is sent. You can bring your own Gemini or OpenAI-compatible model so raw activity never reaches our servers. Export is first-class — CSV, an API, and MCP. And the desktop app is open source, which is the part that matters most in a story like this one: if we disappeared tomorrow, the capture path is inspectable and the code is out there.

We are not going to pretend that makes us immune to the thing that happened to Rewind. It does not. It just means the failure mode is less total.

If you are still running Rewind

Recording has been off since 19 December 2025, so there is no urgency about capture — but there may be about access to your archive, particularly with Pendant support winding down through 2026. If you have not exported, do that before deciding where to go next.

How we compared these

This page is a status report rather than a feature comparison, because there is no live product to compare against. The shutdown timeline is sourced below.

DoneThat is one of the options named here and we build it, which is the bias to read this with. We have deliberately pointed at Screenpipe and Microsoft Recall first for the use cases where they fit better, because sending a Rewind refugee to the wrong replacement helps nobody — least of all us, when they leave two weeks later.

Questions people ask about Rewind

Is Rewind AI still available?

No. Rewind rebranded to Limitless, Meta acquired the company in December 2025, and the app stopped recording on 19 December 2025 — the final software update disabled screen and audio capture. The Mac, Windows and iOS apps are no longer downloadable.

What happened to the Rewind Pendant?

It shipped as the Limitless Pendant after the 2024 rebrand. Following Meta's acquisition, sales stopped and support for existing devices is winding down through 2026.

Why does rewind.ai show a different product now?

The domain now hosts an independent, unaffiliated AI tools platform with no connection to the original screen-recall product. That is worth knowing before you judge Rewind by what is at that address today.

What should I use instead of Rewind AI?

It depends what you used it for. For local-first, open-source continuous capture, Screenpipe is the closest successor. For searchable recall on Windows specifically, Microsoft Recall is built into the OS. DoneThat is the right fit if what you wanted was work reconstruction, coaching and an AI-queryable history rather than a raw replay of everything you saw.