AI memory without the subscription.
Most AI memory is rented monthly. Memrith is a one-time purchase: you own the app and the memory file, and you pay your AI provider directly only for what you use.
Rent the intelligence by the month. Own the memory for good.
Why AI memory became a subscription
The memory features that actually carry context across your chats are good now — and most of them are wired into a monthly plan. ChatGPT references your past conversations, with the fuller version on a paid plan inside your OpenAI account. Claude searches earlier chats and keeps separate memory per Project, and the deeper memory lives on its paid tiers within Anthropic. Standalone "memory layer" products that bolt onto your AI tend to bill the same way: a monthly fee to keep the cloud memory alive.
None of that is a trick, and this page won't pretend the memory doesn't work. It does. But notice the shape of the deal: the memory that remembers you lives in the vendor's cloud, under their retention and training terms, and it stays switched on only while you keep the subscription current. The recurring charge isn't paying for storage — a few kilobytes of memory costs nothing to hold. It's paying for continued access to something the vendor keeps. Stop the plan and, by default, the memory either freezes or goes with it.
There's a structural reason memory is sold by the month. When the memory lives on someone else's servers and is tied to their model, a subscription is the natural container for it — you're renting the model and the memory together, as one monthly relationship. Memrith starts from the opposite assumption: the memory is the durable thing you build, so it should be a file you own once, not a service you re-rent every month.
What you actually pay with Memrith
Two costs, cleanly separated — and neither is a monthly memory fee.
Memrith splits the bill the honest way. You pay $9.99 one time for the app — no subscription, no monthly charge from us, and every 1.x update included. That buys the app and the local memory file, both of which you keep. Then your AI usage is billed by your provider directly, because Memrith is BYOK: you bring your own key from Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter, and the calls go from your device straight to them.
That means you pay your AI provider at their published rates, metered on what you actually send, with no Memrith markup sitting on top. We never touch that money and never see those conversations. If a quiet month means you barely use AI, you barely pay. And because it's your own provider account, you can set a hard spend cap in their dashboard — a ceiling you choose, so usage can't surprise you. The one place a monthly figure might appear is your provider's invoice for usage you controlled, not a memory subscription you're locked into.
The short version of the bill: $9.99 to Memrith, once. After that, the only ongoing cost is metered AI usage you pay your own provider — capped at whatever ceiling you set — and zero dollars a month to keep your memory alive.
The honest math
We won't invent numbers to win the comparison — your actual cost depends entirely on how much AI you use, and anyone quoting you a precise "you'll save $X" is guessing. What we can show plainly is the structure of the two bills, because that's what doesn't change.
A subscription stack is a set of flat monthly fees that recur whether you use them or not, and often more than one at a time: a plan for the model and its memory, sometimes a second plan for a different model you also like, sometimes a separate cloud-memory tool layered on top. Each is a fixed line item every month, for as long as you keep it — and the total resets and charges again next month, forever.
Memrith's bill is a one-time app cost plus metered usage. The $9.99 is paid once and amortizes the longer you own it — a price that only gets better with time, because it never repeats. The usage is pay-as-you-go: heavy months cost more, light months cost little, and you set the cap. If your AI use is light or occasional, a one-time app plus metered BYOK often lands below a stack of flat monthly plans over a year — and the gap widens every year you keep the app. If your use is heavy and constant, a flat all-you-can-use plan can be the simpler deal, and we'll say so. The point isn't that Memrith is always cheaper. It's that you stop paying rent on the memory itself.
How a subscription compares to a one-time purchase
The first four rows are about who keeps what, not about which one can remember. Both ChatGPT and Claude carry context across chats now, depending on your plan; the difference Memrith is built on is that their memory lives in their cloud and can't follow you to another provider, while yours is a file you hold and can take anywhere. If that ownership angle is what you came for, the own-your-memory page goes deeper, and why BYOK covers the portability mechanics.
The honest trade-off
A one-time price plus BYOK is not the same as "free AI," and we'd rather you know that before you buy than feel misled after. There are three real costs to name.
First, BYOK needs a small setup: you create a provider account and paste in a key before Memrith is useful. It's a few minutes, and we wrote a walkthrough for each provider — but it's not the zero-click experience of typing into an app you already pay for. Second, AI usage still costs money. The $9.99 covers Memrith; it does not cover the tokens you send your provider, which you pay them for as you go. Third, that means the "no subscription" promise is precise, not absolute: Memrith has no monthly fee, and your provider bills you for usage you control. We say "no Memrith subscription," not "no spending ever," on purpose.
If a single predictable monthly number is what you want, a flat plan like ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro is genuinely simpler — one fee, model and memory bundled, nothing to set up. Memrith trades that simplicity for two things a flat plan can't give you: a memory file you own outright, and an app you buy once instead of renting forever. That's the deal, stated straight.
Why a one-time purchase fits a memory product
The thing you're really paying for, over years, is the memory — the accumulated understanding of your work, your projects, your past decisions. A subscription model quietly makes that memory the reason you can never stop paying: the longer you build it, the more it costs to walk away. That's a fine business model. It's a poor deal for the person on the other side of it.
Buying the app once inverts the incentive. The memory you build makes Memrith more valuable to you, not more expensive to keep. You can set Memrith down for six months and pick it back up with the file intact and nothing owed. And if you ever want out, the memory is already a file you can export — there's no plan to cancel and no cloud to be locked out of. A backstop matters too: there's a 60-day money-back guarantee, so a one-time purchase isn't a leap of faith.
A subscription rents you access to a memory the vendor keeps. Memrith sells you the memory, once, and you keep it.
Common questions
Is there an AI memory app without a subscription?
Yes. Memrith is a one-time purchase — $9.99, not a recurring fee. There is no monthly memory charge. You bring your own AI key, so the only ongoing cost is the AI usage you pay your provider directly, metered on what you actually send. The memory itself is a file on your machine that you keep whether or not you ever pay anything again.
Does Memrith have a monthly fee?
No. Memrith has no subscription and no monthly fee of any kind. You pay $9.99 once, and all 1.x updates are included. The app keeps working after purchase with no recurring charge from us. Any ongoing spend goes to your AI provider for usage, not to Memrith.
What do I actually pay for with BYOK?
Two separate things. One: the $9.99 one-time purchase of Memrith. Two: your own AI usage, billed directly by whichever provider you connect — Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter — at their published rates, with no Memrith markup. You can set a hard spend cap in your provider's dashboard, so usage can't run away from you.
What happens to my memory if I stop paying?
Nothing — you keep it. There is no subscription to stop, so this is mostly a question about your AI provider. If you let an AI key lapse, the chat features pause, but your memory stays exactly where it is: a local file you own, still readable and exportable. With rented cloud memory, stopping the subscription can freeze or remove your access; with Memrith, the file is already on your machine.
Is a one-time AI app cheaper than ChatGPT Plus?
It depends on how you use it, and we won't fake the numbers. Memrith is a one-time cost plus pay-as-you-go AI usage; a plan like ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro is a flat monthly fee that includes a model and its memory. If your usage is light or occasional, metered BYOK often costs less over a year than a flat monthly plan — and the gap widens the longer you own the app. If you use AI heavily every day, a flat plan can be the simpler deal. The durable difference isn't the price; it's that Memrith's memory is yours to keep and moves between providers, while a plan's memory stays in that vendor's cloud.