The lightweight Screenpipe alternative
Love what Screenpipe stands for but not the heavy footprint or the recurring cost? Trace gives you a private, searchable memory of your day — light on your machine, and a one-time payment instead of a subscription.
Trace is in beta. It is not downloadable yet — join the waitlist and we'll email you when it's ready.
Screenpipe is powerful — and heavy
Let's be fair: Screenpipe is a genuinely good, open-source project. It records your screen and audio continuously, runs OCR over everything, and exposes it all through a developer-friendly, pluggable platform. If you want a fully programmable, do-it-yourself memory layer with deep hooks, it is a strong choice — and being open source is a real advantage.
The trade-off is weight. Continuous screen-and-audio capture plus always-on OCR is inherently resource-intensive — it asks for meaningful RAM and CPU, and on an everyday laptop you can feel it: fans spinning up, battery draining faster, a machine that runs warmer than you'd like. Getting it tuned the way you want also tends to involve some technical setup. None of that is a flaw exactly; it is the cost of recording everything.
There's the money side too. Screenpipe is free and self-hostable at its core, but its managed/cloud offering reportedly runs into the tens of dollars per month on a subscription or credits model. For people who just want their own searchable history sitting quietly on their own disk — without renting it month after month — that recurring commitment can feel like a lot.
If that describes you, you don't necessarily need the maximal, record-it-all approach. You might just want something lighter.
What Trace does differently
Trace is built around a different bet: you rarely need a full video of your screen — you need to find things again. So it captures less, stays out of your way, and still lets you search your whole day.
Small signals, not video
Trace notes lightweight signals — browser history, the active app or window, and clipboard text — rather than recording continuous screen-and-audio footage.
Search & timeline
Type any word you remember, or scroll a timeline to answer "what was I doing on Tuesday?". Instant, fully offline, and yours alone.
Truly local
No servers, no accounts, no sync. Trace is designed to run with your firewall closed, so your memory never leaves your computer.
Screenshots + OCR, later
Optional screenshots with OCR are on the roadmap — opt-in and off by default. Today's capture is deliberately light.
Lightweight by design
The difference isn't a setting you toggle — it's the architecture. Recording the screen and audio non-stop means a heavy capture pipeline, large storage growth, and constant OCR work in the background. Trace skips all of that by default. Logging the page you visited, the window you focused, and the text you copied is dramatically cheaper than encoding video frame by frame.
That keeps Trace quiet. It's meant to run on an ordinary modern PC without becoming the loudest process on your machine, and without you having to wire together a stack to get going. When it launches, the goal is plain: install in one click, and let it sit in the background while it builds up a memory you can search.
And because exclusions run before anything is written to disk, the private apps, domains and incognito windows you block never get captured in the first place — there's nothing to scrub afterward.
One-time price, no subscription
A personal memory tool is something you want to keep for years. Paying for it every single month — or watching a credit balance — turns a quiet utility into a recurring bill you have to justify. Trace takes the opposite path: pay once, own it.
Joining the waitlist locks in the $39 early-bird lifetime price (regular $59), which includes future updates to the desktop app. There's no cloud tier you're quietly funding, because there is no cloud. An optional local-AI "Pro" add-on is planned for later — it runs a model on your own machine, it's entirely optional, and the lifetime app works fully without it.
To be clear and fair: Screenpipe's core is free and open source, so if you're happy self-hosting and tuning it, you can run it at no software cost. Trace's pitch is different — a finished, lightweight app you buy once and forget about, no infrastructure to manage.
Trace vs Screenpipe
A fair, side-by-side look. Different tools for different people — pick the one that fits how you actually work.
| Trace | Screenpipe | |
|---|---|---|
| Capture approach | Light signals: history, active window, clipboard | Continuous screen + audio recording with OCR |
| Resource footprint | Lightweight by design | Heavier, resource-intensive |
| Setup | Aims for one-click install | More technical / developer-oriented |
| Pricing | One-time $39 (early-bird, was $59) | Free core; paid cloud reportedly subscription/credits |
| Runs locally / offline | Yes — works firewall-closed | Yes — local-first too |
| Open source | Open-core engine; paid app on top | Fully open source |
| Best for | A quiet, finished "find anything" app | A programmable, record-everything platform |
| Availability | Beta — join the waitlist | Available now |
Comparison is provided in good faith and reflects publicly reported information; Screenpipe pricing and capabilities may change. Product names belong to their respective owners.
Get started
Trace is in early development and not downloadable yet. Join the waitlist to get the beta, lock in the $39 lifetime price, and be first to try the lightweight, one-time-purchase alternative to Screenpipe.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a lighter Screenpipe alternative?
Yes. Screenpipe is a capable, open-source tool, but it leans on continuous screen recording, which is resource-intensive. Trace is built to be lightweight: it captures small signals — browser history, the active window and clipboard text — instead of recording video around the clock, so it sits quietly in the background on an ordinary computer.
Does Trace have a subscription?
No. Trace is a one-time purchase. Joining the waitlist locks in the $39 early-bird lifetime price (regular $59). An optional local-AI Pro tier is planned for later and is never required to use the app.
Is Trace open source?
Trace is open-core: the capture-and-storage engine is open source and auditable, so you can verify exactly what is collected and confirm there is no network activity. The polished desktop app on top is the paid part. Screenpipe is fully open source, which is one of its real strengths.
Can I download Trace today?
Not yet. Trace is in a waitlist and beta phase — it is not downloadable right now. Join the waitlist and we'll email you when builds are ready, starting with the platform that ships first.
Does Trace send my data to the cloud?
No. Trace runs entirely on your machine, with no servers and no accounts. It is designed to work with your firewall closed, and the open-core engine lets you confirm there is no telemetry or sync.