Pieces

Pieces no longer has a free plan. Many developers once installed it as a free snippet manager. Now the app asks new users to choose a plan on first launch, then runs a 7-day trial with a card on file.

What you pay for has changed as well. Pieces used to call itself Pieces for Developers. Its 2026 site calls it "the AI memory layer for modern work". The app runs in the background and keeps a searchable record of what you do, which it can hand to the AI tools you already use.

What it records, and what it leaves alone

Pieces says it forms a new memory every two seconds. Out of the box it captures two things: what you see in the app you're focused on, and what you copy and paste. Meeting audio, meaning what you hear and say, is opt-in.

The list of sources covers most of a working day. Email in Gmail and Outlook, browsing in Chrome, Arc or Safari, and chat in Slack or Microsoft Teams all count. So do developer tools such as Cursor, VS Code, JetBrains IDEs and Xcode. Research in Perplexity is on the list too.

Memories stay on your machine by default. You can pause Pieces whenever you like, turn off capture for specific apps or websites, and delete data by time, app, website or capture method. That last control is useful in practice. Wiping everything the clipboard picked up during one afternoon takes a few clicks.

Background capture is still the whole point of the product, so settle the exclusions first. Leave out your password manager and banking sites before the trial begins. Client work under a confidentiality agreement belongs on that list too.

The price of a memory

Monthly billing, as the page opened on October 7, 2026. The yearly toggle brings Pro down to $169.99 for twelve months.

Yearly Pro works out to about $14.17 a month, a quarter off the monthly price. Enterprise gets no yearly discount at all, and its quarterly option costs slightly more per month than paying monthly.

Cancel before the seventh day and the card isn't charged. Every plan also carries a 14-day money-back guarantee. Earlier in 2026 the free tier still included the memory and local models, so anyone returning after a break will notice the change.

Recall inside Claude, Cursor and other assistants

Pro bundles several models into one subscription. For each question you can pick Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT or a local model, and narrow the question by time, source or topic.

The MCP server is what many people buy it for. It carries your Pieces history into Claude, Cursor, Codex, Antigravity and other assistants that support MCP. A coding agent can then see the error you looked up yesterday, or the Slack thread where the team settled on an approach. Pro puts no cap on MCP use.

Ready-made summaries handle routine reports such as a standup update or a recap of the day, and meeting prep. Custom summaries follow your own time range and instructions.

Installing it

Pieces runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. On a Mac you choose the download for Apple silicon or Intel, while Linux users install it from the command line. The app asks for a plan as soon as you open it, so the seven days start on the day you install.

Pro is a personal plan. On Enterprise, admins approve the AI providers and capture sources staff may use before a rollout. A team that needs shared rules should start its trial there.

When a notes app is enough

If you'd rather decide what's worth keeping, Obsidian stores notes locally and the app itself is free. Mem organizes the notes you choose to save. For meetings alone, Granola writes notes without a bot and has a free Basic plan. None of them watches your screen, which is either their weakness or their selling point.

Pieces earns its price when context is scattered: a bug traced through a browser, an IDE, a chat thread and a call. Use the trial on real work. On day six, ask it about something from day one that you never wrote down. If the answer saves you a search, it's doing its job. If not, cancel before the card is charged.