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

TLDR: Vida is a proactive AI agent for Mac that watches how you work, builds a long-term memory, and drafts routine tasks before you ask. Ambitious idea, early execution. Best for Mac-based knowledge workers buried in repetitive drafting. Price: free plan available, Pro from $9.90/month. Rating: 7/10.

What is Vida?

We found Vida at the top of Product Hunt on July 4, 2026, where it took the number one spot with 178 upvotes and climbing. It comes from Einsia AI Technology, a small Singapore-registered team that also builds Einsia, an AI research agent for Overleaf. The pitch is printed right on the homepage: “Before you ask, it’s already done.”

Most AI assistants wait for a prompt. Vida flips that. It runs as a desktop app on macOS, passively observes how you work across your open apps, and builds a persistent memory of your projects, preferences, and habits. Then it starts doing things unprompted: drafting replies, preparing briefs, cleaning up your desktop, and writing an end-of-day summary of what you got done. The company frames its roadmap as publicly “conquering 100 SOTA use cases” one at a time. Five are live at launch. That gap between promise and shipped product is the story of this review.

The timing makes sense. 2026 has become the year of the proactive agent: Cluely feeds you answers mid-call, Rewind remembers everything you saw, and every major lab is chasing assistants that act rather than answer. The unsolved problem in all of them is trust. An agent that acts before you ask is either the biggest productivity unlock since the spreadsheet or an expensive way to generate work you have to undo. Vida’s whole design, from previewed file operations to an editable memory, reads like an attempt to earn that trust in small steps rather than demand it up front.

What Are Vida’s Key Features?

Proactive task execution

This is the headline act. Vida learns patterns from your behavior, things like “prefers a morning brief before 9 AM,” and starts executing or pre-drafting work before you request it. In practice, at launch, that means five shipped use cases: Reply Rescue (context-aware reply drafting), Prompt Rescue (turns a rough question into a production-grade prompt), Resume Rescue (builds a tailored resume from your raw docs), Workspace Cleanup, and Daily Wrap. They work, and Reply Rescue in particular is the kind of thing you use daily. But five is a long way from a hundred.

Day one, expect drafting rather than autonomy. Vida prepares the reply, the brief, or the cleanup plan, and you approve it. The makers were candid about this in their Product Hunt comments: trust in autonomous execution is earned gradually as the agent proves itself on your work. That is the right posture, but it means the “already done before you ask” tagline describes the destination, not the current experience.

Cross-app context stitching

Vida reads context from whatever you have open and pulls it into one flow. The example the company shows is a good one: it flagged a conflicting clause in an open contract based on a Slack conversation running in another window. No copy-pasting between a chat app and ChatGPT. If the feature holds up across messier real-world combinations of apps, this is the most valuable thing Vida does.

A memory you can actually see and edit

Always-on observation is creepy by default, and Vida’s makers know it. Everything the agent learns lands in an “About Me” panel where you can view, edit, or delete any memory. You can pause context collection entirely or exclude specific apps. The company says memory is local-first, data is never sold or used for training, and the makers claimed zero cloud retention in their Product Hunt comments. Those claims are unverified, but the visible, editable memory timeline is more control than most competitors give you.

Workspace Cleanup with previews

Point Vida at a messy desktop or a folder of screenshots and it proposes an organized structure, or even a structured report built from the mess. Crucially, it always previews changes and never deletes files. Small feature, but it shows a design philosophy of earning trust gradually rather than asking for blind autonomy on day one.

How Much Does Vida Cost?

Vida starts free. The Basic plan costs $0 forever and includes standard-mode chat, lightweight tasks, and a Tracker limited to 2 scheduled tasks. Pro costs $9.90 per month with a 7-day free trial, and multi-month commitments cut the price: 19% off for 5 months, 33% off for 12 months. Pro unlocks the Ultra model, complex tasks, deep research, document and image generation, global long-term memory, proactive assistance, and unlimited scheduled tasks, plus 500 Ultra credits per month.

Here is the catch: Ultra mode is credit-metered on top of the subscription. Heavy users will buy top-up packs at $10 for 500 credits up to $100 for 7,000, so your real bill can run well past $9.90. Still, against the proactive-assistant field, Vida is cheap. Cluely Pro costs $20 per month, Rewind runs $19 per month, and Raycast Pro with the AI add-on lands around $16. At $9.90 with a free tier below it, Vida undercuts everyone it competes with.

The annual math is even friendlier. The 12-month commitment knocks 33% off, bringing Pro to about $6.63 a month, or roughly $80 a year. For comparison, a year of Cluely Pro runs $240 and a year of Rewind $189. The credit system is the variable to watch: 500 monthly Ultra credits cover moderate use of the heavy features, but if deep research and document generation become your daily habit, budget for a $10 or $20 top-up pack now and then. Light users on the free Basic plan pay nothing at all, which is a perfectly reasonable way to let the product prove itself.

Who is Vida Best For?

Use Vida if you are a founder, PM, or operator who does deep, repetitive desktop work on a Mac and wants drafting, cleanup, and briefing handled before you ask. The footer says it plainly: made for people who work deeply. It fits people who already trust AI with context and want less prompting overhead.

Skip Vida if you work on Windows (a waitlist exists, nothing more), need mobile or web access, or cannot accept an always-observing agent on a work machine until the privacy claims have a track record. Skip it too if you expected the “100 use cases”: you are buying five today and a roadmap tomorrow.

The middle case is the privacy-conscious but curious user. Vida’s app-exclusion controls make a decent compromise: run it with your email and notes apps included, keep your password manager, banking, and anything under NDA excluded, and expand its access as it earns your confidence. You lose some of the cross-app magic that way, but you get to test the core value without betting your whole screen on a new vendor.

What Are the Best Vida Alternatives?

Nobody else does exactly what Vida attempts, which is both the pitch and the warning. The closest neighbors each take one piece of the proactive puzzle and go deep on it.

Cluely is the loudest name in proactive AI right now, feeding you real-time context during calls and meetings. Free for 5 responses a day, then $20 per month for Pro. More focused on live conversations than desktop work.

Raycast comes at the same problem from the launcher angle: free core app, Pro at $8 per month billed annually, plus $8 for the Advanced AI add-on. Less proactive, far more mature, and its extension ecosystem is unmatched on the Mac.

Rewind AI records everything on your screen and lets you search and ask questions about it later, at $19 per month. It is memory without the agency: perfect recall, but it will not draft your replies for you.

Final Verdict: Is Vida Worth It?

Vida is a well-designed early bet on the most interesting idea in AI assistants right now: that the next step is not better answers but fewer prompts. The memory controls are best in class, the price undercuts every rival, and the five shipped use cases are the right five to start with. We also like that file operations preview before they touch anything.

But go in clear-eyed. This is a brand-new product from a small unknown team, only 5% of the promised use-case catalog exists, and the homepage testimonials use generic names with illustrated avatars, which does not build confidence. The privacy claims sound right and are verifiable by nobody yet. Our call: take the 7-day Pro trial if you live on a Mac and drown in repetitive drafting. Keep your expectations at “very good drafting assistant with a memory,” not “clone of yourself,” and you will be happy with the $9.90.

What would move this score up: a steady shipping cadence on the use-case catalog (even 20 of the promised 100 would change the calculus), a Windows release, and third-party verification of the zero-retention claims. What would move it down: the catalog stalling at five while the marketing keeps selling a hundred. We will be watching which way it goes, because the idea deserves to work.