Letta pays LLM on every read. ArgosBrain pays $0.
Letta (formerly MemGPT; Apache-2.0, Letta AI / Charles Packer) ships a tiered memory architecture — core (always in context), archival (vector-searchable), recall (message history) — with agent self-edits via tool calls.
Sleep-time compute performs background LLM summarization during idle time. Letta Code (March 2026) is their memory-first coding harness — #1 model-agnostic open-source agent on Terminal-Bench.
Sources: Letta docs · Letta repo · Letta Code