Mneme: A Free, Local-First Claude Chat Client with Persistent Memory

Mneme is a personal Claude chat client that runs on your own machine, talks to the Anthropic API directly, and bakes memory into every surface from the start — not as an afterthought. Because it uses the API, Sonnet 4.5 is still available in the model picker, even after Anthropic removed it from claude.ai.

The app is free (you pay Anthropic and OpenAI for API usage — roughly $3–$8/mo on Haiku for light use, $30–$60 on Sonnet for moderate-to-high use). No subscription to Mneme itself. Setup is 10–20 minutes, including a PDF guide that Claude can walk you through step-by-step.

Key Features

• Tiered memory: Messages flow from episodic → narrative → entity summaries as relevance shifts; old context is compressed without being lost
• Daily summaries: A 7-day rolling timeline so Claude knows recent context, not just semantically similar matches
• Entity tracking: Hierarchical summaries for people, projects, and things you refer to often
• Narrative concepts: Keyword-triggered recall for ideas you've named
• AI Notes: A persistent section Claude can write to itself between conversations
• Extended thinking, file attachments, text-to-speech
• Command system: @run, artifact, etc.
• Autonomous Python retrieval: The AI can agentically use retrieval if automatic mode fails
• Dynamic context with caching: Every message can have different retrieval without breaking Anthropic's context caching

Technical Details

• Open source (CC BY 4.0)
• Local-first — all data stored in a SQLite database on your machine
• Tested on Windows (one-click installer); Android browser access via local server/Tailscale; iPhone should work; macOS not yet packaged
• Aimed at "journal with an AI" use case (thinking out loud, processing your week) rather than coding agents or RAG over docs

Who It's For

Developers and power users who want a Claude client with persistent, intelligent memory that runs locally and still works with Sonnet 4.5.