2 min read • May 3, 2025
Today, we're excited to announce a fundamental shift in our approach to AI memory technology. Beginning next month, we're making iris-lite and iris-mini memory modules available for free to individual developers, researchers, and small organizations. This decision represents our commitment to democratizing advanced AI capabilities and our belief that memory is too important to remain exclusive to those with the deepest pockets.
The AI landscape is increasingly dominated by a small number of large players with virtually unlimited resources. While competition drives innovation, true breakthroughs often come from unexpected places—the independent researcher working after hours, the startup with a radical new approach, or the academic team pushing theoretical boundaries. By removing financial barriers to our core technology, we aim to empower these voices and diversify the ecosystem of ideas shaping the future of AI memory.
Free access includes our complete iris-lite and iris-mini modules, with full documentation, sample implementations, and community support. These modules provide robust episodic and semantic memory capabilities suitable for most personal projects, research applications, and small-scale commercial implementations. While they don't offer the extensive scaling of our premium tiers, they provide more than enough capability to build sophisticated, context-aware applications with genuine memory capabilities.
We see this as just the beginning. As our technology matures and our community grows, we plan to incrementally expand what's available through our free tier. Our goal isn't to create a watered-down "teaser" that pushes users toward paid options, but to provide genuinely useful tools that can stand on their own. For users with enterprise-scale needs, our premium iris-Large and iris-DEEP options will continue to offer enhanced capabilities, dedicated support, and customization options.
We firmly believe that by making these tools more accessible, we'll not only accelerate innovation in AI memory technologies but discover new applications and approaches we never would have conceived on our own. Join us on this journey by signing up for early access to our free tier at eye.com/iris-access.