Hemory Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Hemory is an always-on listening app for iPhone, Apple Watch and Android that transcribes your day, splits it into activities, and opens the archive to AI agents over MCP. Clever metering and a real agent hook, but phone-only and two months old. Best for: agent-heavy knowledge workers. Price: from $10/mo, free plan no. Rating: 7/10.

What is Hemory?

We found Hemory on Product Hunt, where it launched on 26 September 2026 under the topics Transcription, Productivity, Artificial Intelligence and Audio. The pitch is a searchable memory for your AI agents: leave the app listening through your workday, and everything anyone says becomes a private, timestamped transcript your agent can query. The name is a contraction of Hear and Memory, and the company behind it is Beautiful ONES Inc. of Sunnyvale, California, the same group that runs the ONES.com work tools.

The app itself is not new to the world. Its changelog shows a 1.0 on iOS and Apple Watch dated 1 August 2026, followed by weekly builds through 24 September, and the App Store record lists an iOS version released on 8 August 2026. So the Product Hunt launch is a public debut for a product that has already been shipping fixes for eight weeks, which shows in the polish of the timeline and the honesty of the pricing FAQ.

What Are Hemory’s Key Features?

Always-on listening metered by voice activity

You can start listening by hand or put it on a schedule, such as weekdays 9:00 to 18:00, and the phone or watch nudges you at the right time. The clever part is the meter. Hemory bills by voice-activity detection, so silence, gaps and background noise never touch your quota. The features page claims the Apple Watch can listen for 10 hours on an Ultra 3 or Series 11 with no more than 30 percent extra battery use, and a phone call pauses listening and resumes it on its own.

Automatic transcripts, activities and type-aware summaries

When a session ends, a pipeline transcribes it in any of 100 languages, runs an AI cleaning pass, and splits the day into six activity types: meeting, work, meal, social, learning and chit-chat. Summaries follow the type. Meetings get formal minutes with agenda, decisions and action items; a lunch gets a light note. Tap a transcript line and the device that captured it replays the audio, because raw audio never leaves the listening device.

Speaker recognition by voice

Speaker labelling is an opt-in biometric feature. Hemory builds voiceprints, offers a confidence hint such as Possibly Alex at 42 percent, and once you confirm a name it applies across every past and future session. The terms treat these voiceprints as biometric identifiers: explicit consent before creation, no training, destroyed when you delete the related content or your account. Since 17 September you can also label speakers from inside your agent over MCP.

MCP access for Claude Code, Codex and other agents

This is the reason to care. Hemory runs a standard MCP endpoint, so a single command such as claude mcp add hemory or codex mcp add hemory connects your recordings to the agent you already live in. Keys are read-only and bound to one vault. The demo on the marketing site asks what Daniel promised in last Tuesday’s sync, watches the agent call search_memory, and then drafts the follow-up. The changelog says Hemory is also headed for the Claude and ChatGPT marketplaces, though that had not landed at the time of writing.

What Is It Like to Use Hemory?

The day-to-day surface is a timeline with four sections: Timeline, Activities, People and Agent. Cards show each activity with its type, duration and participants, and a saved-listening card appears the moment you stop so you know audio is safe on the device before analysis finishes. Consecutive short exchanges collapse into a single passing-chats group instead of cluttering the day.

The built-in question-and-answer agent is read-only and multi-turn. You can queue a second question while the first answer streams, stop a reply mid-generation, and ask follow-ups from an event’s detail page with that event’s time, people and topics already in context. Interruption handling has clearly been a battle: three consecutive changelog entries deal with calls stealing the microphone, auto-resume, and alerts that explain why listening stopped.

Signing up needs no payment method, and the trial’s 10 hours never reset, so you can spread them over weeks. When hours run out, listening does not stop. Audio keeps accumulating on the device unprocessed, and topping up later processes the backlog. That is a thoughtful failure mode compared with a recorder that silently goes dark.

Where Does Hemory Fall Short?

Start with platforms. Despite the agent-first pitch, there is no macOS, Windows, Linux or web app; all five are listed as coming soon, along with self-hosting. Android exists, but as a 118 MB sideloaded APK from the vendor’s own server with an in-app updater, not a Play Store listing. Android Watch support is still in beta. If your meetings happen on a laptop, the phone has to sit on the desk doing the work.

Documentation is thin to the point of absent. The docs page indexes exactly two documents, the privacy policy and the terms. There is no MCP setup guide, no list of the tools the endpoint exposes beyond search_memory in a screenshot, and no explanation of how the schedule interacts with battery on older phones. We also found no feature called memory moments anywhere on the site, so do not go looking for one.

The privacy copy does not quite agree with itself. The marketing site says audio is destroyed the moment processing ends and calls this zero audio retention. The terms say raw audio is retained by default for a limited period and then hard deleted, with no period stated. Both are better than most competitors, but they are not the same claim, and a product whose whole premise is recording other people should pick one.

Two pricing details are undefined. The Max tier’s unlimited hours come with a 24-hours-a-day cap and a fair-use clause that is never spelled out. And the FAQ tells you to top up when hours run out, but no top-up price or bundle is published anywhere on the site. Only the three monthly plans are listed, with no annual option and no discount for paying ahead.

Recording law is entirely on you. The terms make you warrant that you have every consent required in your jurisdiction before recording, and several US states and most of Europe require all parties to agree. A scheduled always-on mode makes that promise hard to keep in practice, and Hemory offers nothing in the app to help, such as a consent prompt or an audible indicator for the room.

How Much Does Hemory Cost?

Hemory starts at $10 per month for the Starter plan with 20 hours of voice-active listening a month. Pro is $20 per month for 60 hours, and Max is $50 per month for unlimited hours under the fair-use cap. Each plan includes the full feature set: 100-language transcription, the cleaning pass, activity splitting, type-aware summaries, speaker recognition, the question-and-answer agent, MCP, Apple Watch and scheduled listening. You are only buying hours.

There is no free plan. The Free Trial tier is $0 for a one-time 10 hours that never renews, and the pricing FAQ is refreshingly direct that you should decide about paying once those are gone. Subscriptions go through the App Store, cancel from iOS Settings, and refunds follow Apple’s policy; the terms call fees non-refundable outside app store rules. The web console’s code also references Stripe billing, which neither the FAQ nor the terms mention.

Against the field, $10 for 20 real hours is competitive. Plaud’s app-only Pro plan is $17.99 billed monthly or $8.33 per month on an annual plan for 1,200 minutes, and its Unlimited plan is $29.99 monthly or $19.99 per month annually, on top of a $159 Plaud Note recorder. Otter.ai Pro is $16.99 per user per month, or $8.33 on annual billing, for 1,200 in-app minutes. Granola’s Business plan is $14 per user per month.

The catch is that all three of those minute caps count wall-clock time, while Hemory counts only speech. A day of back-to-back meetings might burn four voice-active hours, so Starter covers about a week of heavy use and Pro roughly three. If you want the always-on lifestyle the marketing site sells, you are really shopping for Max at $50, which is the most expensive consumer plan in this group.

Who is Hemory Best For?

Use Hemory if you already run Claude Code, Codex or another MCP client for most of your work and want it to know what happened in your meetings without you pasting notes. The combination of speaker recognition, activity splitting and a read-only agent hook is unusual, and the 10-hour trial without a card makes it cheap to find out if your agent gets smarter with it.

Use it too if you spend your day in person or on the phone rather than on video calls, and you own an Apple Watch. The watch is the best-supported capture device here, and it beats fishing a phone out mid-conversation.

Skip Hemory if your meetings live in Zoom, Teams or Meet, where Otter or Granola join the call and capture cleaner audio for less. Skip it if you need a desktop app today, if your team needs shared workspaces, admin controls or SSO, or if you work in a two-party-consent jurisdiction and cannot commit to telling every person you talk to that a phone is listening.

Best Hemory Alternatives

Plaud

Plaud pairs a $159 Plaud Note card recorder with an app that has a free 300-minute Starter tier, a Pro plan at $17.99 per month or $8.33 per month billed annually for 1,200 minutes, and an Unlimited plan at $29.99 per month or $19.99 per month billed annually. Dedicated hardware means better microphones and no phone battery drain, and the wearable NotePin fills the always-on role, but you are managing a device and a subscription rather than one app.

Otter.ai

Otter’s Basic plan is free with 300 monthly minutes. Pro is $16.99 per user per month, or $8.33 per month on annual billing, with 1,200 in-app recording minutes and 90-minute meetings; Business is $30 per user per month, or $19.99 annually. Otter joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet automatically and now ships its own MCP endpoint, so it is the closer match for remote-first teams. It is not built for ambient, all-day capture.

Bee

Bee sells the Bee Pioneer wearable for $49.99, a clip or wristband with dual microphones, up to seven days of battery and 40 languages, with iOS, Android and Apple Watch apps for talking to what it heard. It ships only to the United States, and the device currently supports iOS only. Bee’s site does not publish a subscription price, so budget for the hardware and check the app before committing. Limitless, the other well-known pendant, stopped selling to new customers on 5 December 2025 after its acquisition, so it is no longer an option.

Final Verdict: Is Hemory Worth It?

Hemory is the most agent-native product in the ambient-recorder category. Speech-only metering, every feature on every tier, no card for the trial, a hard no-training rule with voiceprints under explicit consent, and a one-line MCP connection add up to a product whose makers understand what people actually do with transcripts in 2026. The weekly changelog since August suggests the team ships and listens.

It is still a version-one phone app with an empty docs page, a sideloaded Android build, no desktop client and a couple of privacy sentences that need reconciling. Spend the free 10 hours with your agent connected. If you find yourself asking it about last Tuesday and getting the right answer, Pro at $20 is a fair price for the everyday user, and Max is only worth $50 if you truly leave it on all day. That earns a 7 out of 10, with room to climb once the desktop and self-host builds arrive.