Why do voice transcription apps charge monthly when Whisper runs locally?

[varenc]

It's why everything is a subscription these days: you make more money.

Consumers undercount the true total cost. And because X% of people will forget they're subscribed and keep paying forever.

If every month you had to either consent to recurring charge on your card or unsubscribe, I'm sure billions of revenue would evaporate overnight from people mass unsubscribing.

(I wish there was regulation that required companies to automatically pause monthly subscriptions if you haven't logged in to or used the service in any way for 3+ months. Though that would create some weird incentives)

[Brybry]

I think requiring notification would be better than automatically pausing (or maybe let people choose?)

My elderly parents have a cheap voip landline that they never use but keep for peace of mind. It'd be unideal if that got automatically "paused" and then it didn't work the one time they tried to use it to call 911.

Sure, the scenario would mean their cell phones are not working, or they're suffering from some cognitive issue, so it's unlikely -- but still plausible.

[turdprincess]

Virtual credit card numbers are a great way to combat this.

For example, the Wall Street journal pricing is pretty wild (8 dollars a month for the first 3 months then jumps to much higher) so I use a virtual card which expires right before the planned price hike.

For other services I like to either use a virtual card with a single transaction limit, or just buy the service and cancel right away which typically is equivalent to just paying for a month

[metalogical]

Exactly this. When I looked at Wisprflow at $12/month, I realized over 2 years I'd pay ~$290 for software that runs entirely on my Mac with near-zero server costs on their end.

The "forgot to cancel" revenue model works, but (like you implied) it's predatory when the software doesn't need ongoing infrastructure.

[mazzystar]

You might want to check out https://whispernotes.app - it's a one-time purchase, no subscription. For offline apps with no ongoing server costs, I think buy-once should at least be an option alongside subscriptions.

[siva7]

It's not that you make more money with subscriptions. It's because you make some money to survive at all if you're not a big company. People who run a small business understand this.

[metalogical]

Whisper runs fine locally. So why are Willow ($144/year), Wisprflow ($120/year), and SuperWhisper ($120/year) all subscriptions?

I got frustrated paying monthly for something that could run on my Mac, so I built Lucid Voice:

- 100% offline (Nvidia Parakeet + Llama)

- $20 one-time (mainly to cover Apple's notarization costs)

- Runs on surprisingly low-end hardware (M1 base models work fine)

- No cloud, no data collection

Open to feedback on anything - pricing, the tech stack, or if this should just be free: https://lucidvoice.app

[joshribakoff]

Thanks for sharing. As someone who used dragon naturally speaking, which did fine tuning back in the 90s, i was genuinely surprised at the implementation gap.

[dockerd]

The pricing is good for customer.

At the same time, I think you shouldn't give away "Lifetime updates" for same pricing tier. Are you planning to support it for the next 10+ years and across next 5-10 mac hardware/version without any new license cost?

[amanzi]

Can you build a Linux version? :-)

Still haven't managed to find one that works as well as MacWhisper.

[cebert]

Good idea. I was hoping to at least see an overview of this from my phone, but when I opened the link, it said it’s for desktop only and became uninterested.

[ottobonn]

I have been looking for this on Linux (Gnome) and would love something like it. I can't find a simple way to get system-level voice input.

[steveharman]

Pleaee talk me into buying your product! :-) I currently use the free version of Superwhisper on Mac.

[rvz]

> - No cloud, no data collection

How can this be guaranteed if it is closed source?

Other than that, great project.

[nextworddev]

Can you open source this

[odie5533]

Handy https://handy.computer/ is a free and open source voice transcription app. Works on macOS, Linux, and Windows, and you can pick which model. Everything runs locally. There is no API.

I use the app constantly, all day long.

[parlortricks]

I just fired this up at work, and it was so seamless and my few small tests worked well.

[satvikpendem]

MacWhisper [0] is a long-running project with a lot more features, what's the main difference, just the price?

[0] https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

[gumboshoes]

After trying a dozen or more paid and open source, I keep going back to MacWhisper. The dictation feature is in advanced beta but works well. The only thing I want it doesn't have is to have different models chosen for different tasks at the same time: one model for each drop folder, a different one for dictation and then another general-purpose one for drag-and-drop. I have the memory for it and MacWhisper can flush a model after a certain amount of unuse time anyway.

[metalogical]

Right now it's dictation-first vs MacWhisper's file transcription focus. Planning to add meeting recording and batch processing eventually.

Heard some feedback about reliability issues with MacWhisper as well - trying to build something more stable from the ground up.

[behnamoh]

it's been a PITA though, lots of features not working, files disappearing and the developer blaming the OS (!), and separate payment for the iOS app.

[drewda]

For a premium UI around the open-source Whisper core, there's also MacWhisper: https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

[shade]

I'm deaf, so I test a lot of speech to text and transcription apps from an accessibility point of view.

My answer to "why have a monthly subscription" would be that you need capabilities that Whisper doesn't handle well, like real-time transcription in noisy environments.

That's not the niche you're targeting here, though. :)

My experience is that Whisper - not being built for real time speech to text - isn't as good at it as other tools are. You can hack something together by stacking together progressively more audio frames to feed to Whisper to give it context, but IME, you're going to get better results from a model that's designed for real-time STT in the first place, or by using a service like Azure Speech to Text which has excellent noise resilience... but which is also an ongoing cost which would justify a subscription. Real-time Whisper also devours your battery quickly.

That said - while I've had very good experiences with Parakeet in MacWhisper, I'm curious if you evaluated Apple's SpeechAnalyzer APIs at all. It's unfortunately limited macOS/iOS/iPadOS 26+ since it's a new API, but it's on device, has comparable quality of results to Whisper Large v3 Turbo and Parakeet, and seems to be better on battery usage.

[hagbard_c]

This drive to turn one-time sales into repeating subscription fees has soured me even more on the concept of 'buying' (which really comes down to 'renting') software and makes it far less likely that I will ever pay to use these products. I'll go rather great lengths to avoid any software which comes with a price tag not even so much for the actual price - if I count time invested in finding, building, installing and maintaining free (as in freedom as well as beer) software alternatives to paid proprietary products it probably comes out even or more 'expensive' - but to avoid the whole licence/renew/upsell/'gold-silver-platinum-Pro-whatever' dance and the accompanying lock-in. It is a bit like how the onslaught of online advertising has turned me from being somewhat tolerant towards banner advertisements into a rabid content blocker who makes sure not a single piece of advertising ever gets to pollute my eyes or ears. Squeeze too hard and you'll find your hands empty before you realise it.

[maxlin]

The same reason any software costs money even when you run it locally I suppose. Local software having a subscription instead of a single price seems to just be increasingly common these days.

I'd assume there are good free alternatives though. If not I'd have a non-zero motivation to build one, having dabbled enough with whisper and running several of my own distributed automatic transcription systems

[protocolture]

Its been years since I touched transcription professionally, but my memory is that they started off as a mechanical turk operation.

Lawyers usually would purchase transcription devices, and then either they would have a pool of transcribers (i remember installing foot pedals for forward/back playback operation) or pay a subscription to the manufacturer for mysterious likely offshore people to transcribe for them.

People have a hard time letting go of revenue, but I am betting most of the same people are still in business and want to pied piper consumers of transcription services to the same business model that now costs them pennies instead of wages.

[protocolture]

https://voicex.com.au/olympus-rs28h-usb-foot-control.html

Oww my back

[justanotherunit]

This is great! I’ve been diving deep into local models that can run on this kind of hardware. Been building this exact same thing, but for complete recordings of meetings and such because, why not? I can even run a low-end model with ollama to refine and summaries the transcription. Even combining with smaller embedding models for a modern, semantic search. It has surprised me how well this works, and how fast it actually is locally.

Hopefully we will see even more locally run AI models in the future with a complete package.

[hn_throw2025]

I’m using an Intel Macbook with hardly any GPU capacity to speak of, so running locally isn’t straightforward for me.

I’ve found that Whispering [https://github.com/EpicenterHQ/epicenter/tree/main/apps/whis...] plus Groq pay-as-you-go is a great combination. Not quite free, but cheap enough that it isn’t a consideration.

[clydethefrog]

Owners of a iPhone 12 and higher don't even have to pay- they can use the built in transcription in Voice Memos app for the most popular languages.

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/view-a-transcription-...

[Void_]

I made WhisperType [1].

The price tag is $30/YEAR. The current MRR is about $700 and I'm paying $7/mo for Groq Whisper Turbo.

These apps really don't have any reason to be so pricey, it's all just margin.

1. https://whispertype.com/

[trenchpilgrim]

Whisper runs so well locally on recent hardware, I've embedded it directly into hobbyist applications to provide STT-based commands.

[hastamelo]

I find the Windows included one (Win+H) very good.

[geor9e]

Okay, but have you used the large Whisper model? Sure, voice typing has been around for 10 or 20 years. And it's great if you have a good mic and enunciate, but these new models are insane. You can just mumble something from across an entire room, with peanut butter in your mouth, and it won't miss a single word.

[joak]

This is an ad for speech-to-text app that you need to pay for

Spokenly is free (one time fee of $0) and does the same (and even more)

[chetangoti]

I went to try it but unfortunately requires license to be activated before trying out.

[metalogical]

Should have a trial set up - working on that for the next update. For now, buy it and if you don't like it after a week, email [email protected] and I'll refund immediately. Just testing what people actually want right now :)

[snthpy]

Why do shops charge for strawberries when they grow for free in my garden?

[Brian_K_White]

They do not. (charge monthly for strawberries that have already been sold and "run locally")

[hofo]

How is this relevant to the app?