Omi guide › Compared
The whole field
There are only about six devices that genuinely matter in this category. Comparing their microphones is a waste of your afternoon, because the thing that decides whether you still have your recordings in three years isn't a specification. It's the ownership column.
Start here
This is not a tangent before the comparison — it is the comparison. Between February 2025 and December 2026, half the field was bought, killed, or put on a timer.
HP bought Humane's software, patents and team for $116 million and shut the product down. Cloud services stopped on 28 February 2025 — after which the Pins couldn't answer a question or place a call. Owners were told to download their photos and notes first, because the rest would be erased.
Amazon acquired Bee on 22 July 2025 and absorbed the team. Unlike the others it survived the purchase — Amazon showed it at CES 2026 as part of the Alexa and Echo roadmap. It is alive, cheap, and now a limb of Amazon's assistant business rather than an independent product.
Shut down outright on 19 December 2025 as part of the Limitless acquisition. No transition, no successor.
Meta acquired Limitless on 5 December 2025. Sales stopped that day; desktop and web capture ended on the 19th; seven countries lost the service entirely and had their data deleted. Existing owners got the paid plan free and a promise of support "throughout 2026" — which ends in December. The full timeline, and what to do →
The two notable devices nobody has bought. Plaud is a conventional company with a conventional product. Omi is the odd one — open source top to bottom, which means that even if somebody does buy it, the thing you own keeps working.
The chart
Prices are what the maker charges today. Where a device is dead, we've left it in rather than tidying it away — the graveyard is part of the information.
| Device | Price | Who owns it | Status | Ongoing cost | Where your words live |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OmiBased Hardware | $179 out of stock |
Independent | Active | Free tier is real: unlimited on-phone, 1,200 cloud min/mo. Unlimited $269/yr. | Their cloud, or your own server. Open source, MIT. |
| Plaud NotePin SPlaud | $179 | Independent | Active | Free 300 min/mo. Pro $99.99/yr. Unlimited $239.99/yr. | Plaud's cloud. ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA compliant. |
| BeeAmazon | $49.99 | Amazon | Active | Cheapest hardware in the field. ~7-day battery. | Amazon's cloud, folded into Alexa. |
| Friend 2.0Avi Schiffmann | $249 was $99 in 2024 |
Independent | Active | $10/mo to remember past 30 days. | Their cloud. A companion, not a notetaker — different job. |
| Limitless PendantMeta | Not sold | Meta | Dies 31 Dec 2026 | Free for existing owners until it ends. | Meta's now. Export before December. |
| Humane AI PinHP | — | HP | Dead 28 Feb 2025 | — | Erased. |
| RewindMeta | — | Meta | Dead 19 Dec 2025 | — | Gone with the acquisition. |
| The KeeperMemsist — ours | See pricing | Yours | Active | No per-minute cloud bill — it runs on your own equipment. | Your own home. Open hardware, so no one can switch it off. |
Scroll the table sideways on a narrow screen. Read 6 August 2026 — prices in this category move constantly.
What actually separates them
Every device here except Omi and the Keeper keeps your day on a company's servers. That's fine until the company is sold — and in this category, being sold is the normal outcome rather than the exception.
Only open hardware does. When Humane died, the Pins became jewellery. When Limitless ends, the pendants would too — except that Omi's app will adopt them, which is exactly the point about open software.
The sticker price is the small number. Plaud Unlimited is $239.99 a year, Omi Unlimited $269, Friend $10 a month. Over three years the subscription usually outweighs the device.
Prices across the whole category are climbing. Friend went $99 → $129 → $249. Omi went $89 → $179. The early era of cheap always-on recorders is over, and the survivors are charging what the thing actually costs to run.
Which makes the free tiers worth reading carefully. Omi's is unusual because the transcription happens on your phone, so it isn't subsidising a server bill — it's genuinely free rather than a trial in disguise.
Where Omi sits
If you ranked these on polish, Omi would not win. Plaud makes a cleaner product with more predictable output. Bee is a quarter of the price and lasts a week on a charge. Friend is better company, if company is what you want.
Omi wins on exactly one axis, and it happens to be the axis this whole category keeps failing on: it cannot be taken away from you. The hardware schematics, the firmware, the app and the server software are all published under the MIT licence. If Based Hardware were bought tomorrow by somebody with a roadmap of their own, the code would still be there, your device would still work, and you could point it at a machine in your own house.
Three of the six best-known devices in this category are now owned by Meta, Amazon or HP. Two of those are dead or dying. That is not a run of bad luck — it's what happens to small companies holding valuable data. Buying on features assumes the company outlives the purchase, and the record says otherwise.
The honest cost of choosing Omi is real: it's rough, it's frequently out of stock, the Android battery drain is genuine, and you'll do more of the work yourself. Our review round-up doesn't soften any of that.
Choosing
Plaud NotePin S. The output is predictable and legible, the compliance paperwork is real, and it's the same $179 as an Omi. If your recordings are work product rather than a life record, take the polished one.
Bee, at $49.99. A week of battery and a low price. Understand that you're handing your days to Amazon, and that it's now part of the Alexa business rather than its own thing.
Omi, or the Keeper. These are the only two answers on this page, because they're the only two where no company sits between you and your own recordings.
Don't buy anything yet. Export your history, then pair the pendant you already have with Omi — the hardware outlives the service, and it costs you nothing.
None of these, honestly, as a box on a doorstep. They all assume a confident phone user. That gap is why the Keeper exists — the same idea, set up in the home by a person who then stays reachable.
Our stake in this
We build the Keeper on Omi hardware, and the Keeper is in the chart above. So we are not a neutral referee, and a comparison page that concluded anything else would deserve suspicion.
What we can offer instead is a checkable one. Prices came from each maker's own store on 6 August 2026. Acquisition dates and shutdown dates come from the companies' own announcements and from contemporaneous reporting — HP/Humane in February 2025, Amazon/Bee in July 2025, Meta/Limitless in December 2025. Where we've stated something as our own finding rather than a published fact, we've said so.
If the chart is wrong or out of date, tell us and we'll fix it. Text 501·365·1001.
Still deciding
Even when that's not us. Read the Omi reviews, watch the hands-on videos, or just ask a person.
Text 501 · 365 · 1001