Blog · Ownership
When the recorder company disappears: Humane, Limitless and Bee
Humane's AI Pin stopped working and its cloud data was deleted. Limitless stopped selling its pendant after Meta bought it. Amazon bought Bee. If your recordings live in someone else's cloud, their roadmap decides what happens to them.
Three endings in a year
| Device | What happened | What it meant for users' data |
|---|---|---|
| Humane AI Pin | HP bought Humane's assets for $116M; the service shut down on 28 Feb 2025 | Data in Humane's cloud was deleted. Users had to sync before the cutoff |
| Limitless Pendant | Meta acquired Limitless; the team joined Reality Labs | Sales stopped. Existing customers got a year of support and an export or delete option |
| Bee | Amazon announced it would buy Bee | Bee said recordings were not saved or used for training; the transcripts' future depends on the new owner |
None of these companies did anything wrong by being acquired or closing. Limitless gave customers a year and a way out. The point is structural: when a recording lives on a vendor's servers, the vendor's next deal decides what happens to it, and the user's choice shrinks to export or lose it.
The category is still growing
Carried recorders are not going away. Plaud says it has shipped over two million devices and passed $100M in annual recurring software revenue. Omi publishes its hardware and app as open source, so the device can outlive the company. Those are different answers to the same question.
Our answer: the files are yours
Vlocalhost stores recordings, transcripts, notes and VIBE records as files and a local database on the user's computer. Every record is readable without us: CSV, JSON, text and SQLite, opened with ordinary tools. Core is open source on GitHub, so the code that writes those files can be read and built by anyone.
That is a promise about where data lives, not about features. It is the one we think matters most when the device that heard you is no longer sold.
Sources
- Humane AI Pin to be shut down after HP acquisition · GIGAZINE, 19 Feb 2025
- Meta acquires AI device startup Limitless · TechCrunch, 5 Dec 2025
- Amazon acquires Bee, the AI wearable that records everything you say · TechCrunch, 22 Jul 2025
- Plaud tops $100M ARR after shipping over 2M AI notetakers · TechCrunch, 16 Jun 2026
- Omi · Based Hardware, GitHub, checked 10 Oct 2026