mempalace

MemPalace gives your AI assistant a long-term memory that lives entirely on your own machine. It stores your conversations and documents verbatim, nothing summarized away, then lets the assistant pull back the exact relevant pieces with semantic search. No cloud, no API key, no subscription. It's MIT licensed and free, organized around a memory-palace metaphor: wings for people and projects, rooms for topics, drawers holding the original content.

Under the hood it's a Python system with a pluggable vector backend, ChromaDB by default, with Qdrant, pgvector, and a SQLite option if you'd rather. The headline integration is an MCP server (now around 29 tools) with auto-save hooks for Claude Code, plus a CLI and a Python API, and there are now Docker images for both CPU and GPU. Recent work added a graph layer that links related memories, document mining for PDFs, Word, and PowerPoint files, and multilingual recall out of the box. Setup is moderate: install the package, pick a backend, wire up the MCP server.

For a solo developer who wants their assistant to actually remember context across sessions without shipping every conversation to a vendor, this is one of the strongest local options going. The closest comparison is supermemory, which leans more on a hosted API; MemPalace's whole pitch is that everything stays local and free. Small teams can self-host it the same way. There's no paid tier to weigh, because there isn't one.

The catch is pace. This is a very young, extremely fast-moving project that just graduated from one person's account to its own organization, and it ships releases constantly. The benchmark numbers it cites are strong, but expect rough edges and frequent changes, and pin your version if you're depending on it.