Minne and Goldfish — which one is for you?

Of everything Minne gets compared to, Goldfish is the closest. Both are lightweight Mac apps that quietly build a memory of your work and draft from it, in your tone, when you press Option in a text field. Both read the text of your windows through the Accessibility APIs — no screenshots, no screen recording, in Goldfish's case in its own words. Both keep the memory on your machine, auto-generate a browsable wiki from it, and serve it to Claude Desktop over local MCP.

So the choice is not about the idea — it is the same idea. It comes down to three things: who runs the model, what the memory is stored as, and whether you can read the code.

When two tools share an idea, compare their defaults: where the model runs, what format the memory takes, and what you can verify. That is where alike products stop being alike.

What Goldfish does well

From Goldfish's own site and Product Hunt page, checked at the date in the footer:

• The same one-key promise, polished. Press ⌥ Option anywhere you type to reply, write, summarise or continue, with the context already in front of you — plus a chat "aquarium" in the notch.
• More than drafting. It identifies your repetitive workflows, notices forgotten follow-ups and nudges you, and does voice dictation.
• A clear privacy posture. Its privacy policy is plainly written: memory in a local SQLite database on your device, capture via the accessibility APIs — "No screenshots. No screen recording. Just text." — with pause, per-app and per-domain exclusions, and delete controls.
• Real traction. #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt (16 June 2026), 987 upvotes and a 5.0 rating across its first 7 reviews at time of checking. Built by Joel and Kaspian, two Swedes in San Francisco.
• A Windows build, alongside the Mac one. Free while in beta; post-beta pricing is not yet published.

Where Minne differs

• You choose — and can keep — the model. Goldfish routes every AI request through its own Azure OpenAI deployment, with zero data retention per its policy; there is no bring-your-own-model option on its site. Minne has no deployment to route through: bring an Anthropic or OpenAI key, sign in with a subscription, or point it at Ollama on your own machine — in which case nothing leaves it at all.
• The memory is markdown files, not a database. Goldfish stores memory in a local SQLite database and lets you browse its wiki in the app. Minne's wiki is the files: one page per person, project and topic in ~/Minne, open-in-Obsidian compatible, greppable, git-able, with a schema file you own governing what gets kept. The folder is the product.
• No account, no telemetry. Goldfish's policy describes optional accounts, Stripe billing plumbing and limited event-only telemetry. Minne has none of the three — there is no Minne server for any of it to talk to, and the egress ledger is the complete list of what travels.
• You can read the code. Minne is MIT-licensed and public; every claim above is checkable against the source. Goldfish's code is not published as of this check. For a category this intimate, that is the deepest difference: one product asks for trust, the other shows its work.

Choose Goldfish if…

• You want the most polished version of this idea today, with workflow detection, follow-up nudges and dictation on top.
• You like AI being handled for you — one deployment, zero configuration, free while the beta lasts.
• You need Windows.

Choose Minne if…

• You want to pick the model — including a fully local one — rather than use the vendor's.
• You want the memory as plain files you can open, edit and take with you, not a database inside an app.
• You want open source, no account and no telemetry, and are comfortable with early software — Minne is young and says so.

It is genuinely pleasing that the closest product to Minne shares its text-not-pixels conviction — the case for that approach applies to both. For what either kind of tool should be measured against, start at what is a personal AI memory?; for the other neighbours, see Minne and OpenHistory — open source, same no-screenshot stance, timeline-shaped — Minne and Elephas and Minne and Raycast AI.

Product facts on this page were checked against each product's own published material on 2026-08-27. Something outdated? Say so and it will be fixed.

Free, open source, and yours to read. macOS 14 and later.