A few months ago, a popular AI tool had a rough weekend. Servers degraded, chats failed to load, memory features went dark for the better part of a day. For most users it was an inconvenience. For a small number of people — the ones who had spent months teaching the assistant their work, their projects, their voice — it was something closer to a small panic.
They had outsourced a piece of their mind. The piece went offline. They couldn't get it back.
The fragility nobody prices in
When you build a workflow around a hosted AI product, you're betting on three things: that the company stays solvent, that the service stays up, and that the terms stay the same. All three are outside your control. All three have, in the last two years, failed at different times for different products.
Most of the time, the bet pays off. The service is up. The company is fine. The terms are tolerable. Then, one day, one of them isn't, and you discover how much of your thinking you'd parked in someone else's building.
This isn't hypothetical. Products get sunsetted. Pricing gets repriced. Free tiers get tightened. Features get "deprecated." Companies get acquired by companies with different incentives. Each of these is a normal event in the life of a software business. Each of them is a small disaster for a user who built their second brain on top of it.
The portability problem
Even when the company is behaving well, there's a deeper issue: you can't really take the memory with you. You can export your chats. You cannot export the model's understanding of you. That understanding is encoded in weights and proprietary representations that don't travel.
So when the company goes down — permanently, or just for a weekend — you don't just lose access. You lose continuity. The next assistant you onboard starts from zero. The months of context you built are gone, not because the data was deleted, but because the data was never yours in a form you could use.
It's the difference between a notebook and a phone book. You can copy a notebook. You can't copy a relationship.
Open source as insurance
This is where open source stops being an ideological preference and starts being a practical one. If the software you depend on is open source and self-hostable, the company going down is annoying, not catastrophic. You can run it yourself. You can fork it. You can hand it to a friend or a freelancer or a different vendor. The service can disappear; the software doesn't have to.
Eigen Mesh is built on this premise. It's Apache 2.0, self-hostable with Docker Compose. If our hosted version goes away — if we get hit by a bus, if we pivot, if we get acquired by someone who changes the terms — your memory doesn't have to go with it. You can run the same software on your own server, with your own data, and keep going.
We're not pretending we'll live forever. We're designing as if we won't.
The data question
There's a second piece, less obvious but more important: where the data lives. Even if the software is open source, if your data is on our servers, an outage is still an outage. The self-hostable path matters because it puts the data on hardware you control.
This is why we don't train on your data, and why we put servers in the EU, and why we make self-hosting a first-class option rather than an afterthought. The point isn't that we're untrustworthy. The point is that you shouldn't have to trust us. Trust should be a convenience, not a dependency.
A small thought experiment
Imagine the AI tool you use most announced tomorrow that it was shutting down in 30 days. What would you do?
If the answer is "panic, then scramble, then lose most of what I built," you've got a portability problem. If the answer is "export, switch, keep going," you don't.
Most people, honestly, are in the first camp. They've been building equity in something they don't hold. They just haven't thought about it, because the service has been up.
Services are up until they're not. Companies are solvent until they're not. Terms are stable until they're not. The way you protect yourself against the day one of those flips is by choosing, today, where the memory lives.
What we'd want you to do with this
You don't have to use Eigen Mesh. But please use something where the memory is yours. Open source, self-hostable, portable. The hosted version is convenient; the self-hosted version is the point. If you only ever use the hosted version, you've made a slightly better trap. The escape hatch is the feature.
Eigen Mesh is open source under Apache 2.0 — github.com/hikaru90/eigen. Self-host with Docker Compose, or get early access to the hosted version. 100 free credits on signup, then €3.99/month — less than a coffee. Servers in the EU. We don't train on your data, and the day we can't keep the lights on, the software keeps working without us.