Frequently asked questions.

An Obsidian plugin that gives your vault a long-term, queryable memory. The core feature: you can ask "what did I know about X in 2023?" and get answers sourced from your own notes with timestamps. It runs entirely on your local machine — no cloud, no account, no API keys required.

No. They solve "what's related now?" ChronRecall solves "what did I know then?" and "what did I forget?" You can run all of them in parallel — the indexes don't conflict, and ChronRecall's .vault-memory/ folder is namespaced.

Yes. ChronRecall reads your vault as-is. No migration, no reorganisation, no import step. Your folder structure, tags, frontmatter, and Obsidian Sync setup are preserved untouched.

No. Plugin v0.1 ships in approximately 4–8 weeks. There is no payment, no Stripe link, nothing to buy today. Joining the waitlist is free — you get an email the moment v0.1 is publicly available in the Obsidian Plugin Marketplace.

Yes. Lifetime €99 will be offered exclusively to waitlist members when v0.1 ships. It will be limited to the first 100 people — after that, Lifetime is gone and pricing returns to €12/month for Pro and €25/month for Pro+. Join the waitlist to lock in the €99 price.

Unsubscribe anytime — there is no payment yet, so there is nothing to cancel or refund. If you want your email deleted entirely, email hello@chronrecall.com and it is removed immediately, no questions asked.

Building software you cannot try yet and asking for money would be selling a promise. We would rather show you the working plugin first, then offer Lifetime to the people who waited. When v0.1 ships and the Stripe button appears, you will have already seen exactly what you are paying for.

€99, paid once at launch, gives you full Pro+ access for as long as ChronRecall exists. No renewal, no upsell. The Lifetime tier is capped at the first 100 waitlist members and exists to fund the build — after that it disappears and pricing returns to €12/month for Pro and €25/month for Pro+.

Lifetime is a one-time offer at launch for waitlist members only. After the first 100 spots, the only way to get Pro features is the monthly tier. Pro at €12/mo is for users who join after Lifetime is gone or who prefer subscription billing.

Free is real, not a teaser. You get a local vector index and basic semantic search of your vault, MIT-licensed and open-source. The features that took the most R&D — Cross-Temporal Recall, Forgotten-Insights, Cryptographic Provenance — are paid. That's the deal.

Not unless you explicitly opt-in to a hosted model (OpenAI, Anthropic) for a specific query. By default, indexing, retrieval, and answer generation all run on your machine via Ollama and local embeddings (nomic-embed-text). The plugin has no backend, no telemetry, no analytics.

Because your vault is the private record of your thinking. A tool that requires a third party to read it before it can help you is not a private tool. Microsoft Recall and Apple Personal Context have made "personal AI memory" mainstream — ChronRecall is the version that stays on your machine.

Yes. ChronRecall stores its index in a subfolder (.vault-memory/) inside your vault. You can exclude this folder from Obsidian Sync if you prefer (recommended — the index rebuilds automatically and would otherwise be re-uploaded on every change). Your notes and settings are not affected.

Indexing and retrieval work on any modern Mac, Windows, or Linux machine with 8 GB RAM — no GPU required. For LLM-powered answers, the sweet spot is 16 GB RAM with an M1+ Mac or modern Intel/AMD CPU running Ollama. See the hardware tier matrix on the features page for honest expectations per tier.

Anything Ollama can run locally — Llama 3.2/3.3, Qwen 2.5, Mistral, Phi-3, etc. ChronRecall works with the model you already have configured. There is no preferred model — the retrieval layer is what makes the plugin valuable; the LLM just turns the retrieved chunks into prose.

Yes, opt-in per-query. Bring your own API key, paste it into settings. When you toggle "use cloud model" the plugin sends only the retrieved chunks (not your full vault) to the chosen provider. Default state is always local.

No payment is taken during the waitlist phase, so no refund is applicable today. Once the Lifetime offer goes live at launch, it will include a full-refund guarantee: if ChronRecall v0.1 is not publicly available in the Obsidian Plugin Marketplace within the stated window, every Lifetime customer receives a full automatic refund. Details will be published when the Lifetime offer opens.

The three differentiator features — Cross-Temporal Recall, Forgotten-Insights, Cryptographic Provenance — are the promise. If any one of them is dropped before shipping, every paying customer will be offered a full refund with no questions asked. This applies once Lifetime payments open at launch. Scope reductions on minor features (theming, a specific export format) don't trigger refunds; the three core features do.