Problem

screenpipe addresses the loss and fragmentation of digital work context. People switch among screens, applications, browser tabs, calls, and documents, then have to reconstruct what happened, search manually for the right moment, or explain their work repeatedly to an AI assistant. Teams face a related economic problem: repeated handoffs, manual documentation, and poorly understood processes consume employee time; screenpipe’s enterprise example identifies 14 hours per week at stake in one workflow affecting six people. Privacy makes the problem harder because conventional cloud-based recording can expose an employee’s entire workday and sensitive company data.

The strongest immediate use case is meeting and work-session memory: capture the audio, screen, slides, documents, and chat surrounding a call, then retrieve the relevant discussion or generate notes and action items afterward. For organizations, the same capability extends to discovering repetitive work, documenting how it is actually performed, and prioritizing automation rather than asking employees to document every process by hand.

Product / Service

screenpipe is a local-first, source-available desktop application for macOS, Windows, and Linux. It continuously captures screen and audio context, uses accessibility APIs to extract application text with OCR as a fallback, transcribes system and microphone audio with Whisper locally, and stores screenshots, text, and transcripts in a local searchable database. Users can search their history with natural-language queries and retrieve screenshots, text, and audio rather than digging through undifferentiated video files.

The product also functions as an agent context layer: its Pipes plugin system, localhost REST API, and JavaScript/TypeScript SDK let developers create meeting summaries, daily recaps, journals, workflow reports, and other automations. The delivery model combines a free starting point with paid desktop subscriptions and team and enterprise offerings; the repository lists app pricing beginning at $25 per month, with higher tiers adding cloud sync, cloud AI, managed seats, administration, SSO/SAML, and deployment controls. Its core benefit is persistent, actionable work memory while keeping capture and processing on the user’s device by default.

Market

screenpipe competes in the emerging AI memory and personal knowledge-management market, while also reaching into meeting intelligence, privacy-first screen recording, computer-use agent infrastructure, and enterprise workflow intelligence. Named alternatives include Rewind/Limitless, Microsoft Recall, Granola, Otter.ai, Omi, Pieces, Plaud, Town, Scribe, and Teramind. Its differentiation is the combination of screen and audio capture, cross-platform coverage, local-first processing, source availability, a developer API, and workflow-oriented agents rather than a meeting-only recorder or a cloud-first assistant.

The public evidence shows meaningful developer traction but does not disclose customer counts, revenue, or revenue scale. The GitHub repository shows 20,657 stars and 2,046 forks, following a 2024 launch surge in which it became GitHub’s number-one trending repository and reached 5,000 stars overnight; the company also reported securing investment at that time. By July 2026 it had joined Y Combinator’s S26 batch and was selling paid app and enterprise plans, so it is a commercial product with visible community traction, although its financial traction remains undisclosed.