I Built a 3.8MB Rust Binary That Replaces Mem0's $99/month Cloud Service

There's a quiet absurdity at the heart of AI memory services: you're paying a subscription fee to send your private thoughts, conversations, and context to a third-party server so that an AI can remember them on your behalf. Every preference you share. Every personal detail you mention. Every project you describe. It goes to their cloud. It sits in their database. And it costs you $99/month for the privilege. I wanted something different. So I built Cortex. The Problem With Cloud AI Memory Modern AI assistants suffer from goldfish syndrome. Every conversation starts cold. You re-explain your stack, your preferences, your constraints. You watch the model confidently give you advice that contradicts what you told it last week — because it has no memory of last week. The existing solutions all have the same shape: send your data to a cloud API, pay per seat, hope their privacy policy holds. Mem0, the most popular option, charges $99/month for their Pro tier. OpenAI Memory is locked inside