[bushido]

I've been doing the same. I don't mind SaaS subscription fees, but I often run into things where I need a niche feature that doesn't exist.

Incidentally, I ran into something like this with WhisperFlow last year. Used it for a few weeks, loved it, basically hardly typed for the month and just spoke to my system/terminal etc.

But, I ran into a unique challenge. Barking orders at my computed for 8 hours a day made me realize that I was changing how I communicated with people. Being nicer was easier to solve, but speech-to-text made me less articulate. I wasn't very articulate to begin with -- which is something that I have wanted to solve for a while.

So I built my own STT app, that works in a similar way as whisperflow, with a few notable exceptions. Minor: it has dictionaries, snippets etc on a per app/website basis. Major: most notably it has rubrics on how I want to communicate in different contexts, ex: Biz Exec over email, Principle engineer in my ide/terminal. etc

And scores me on areas like conciseness, flow, logical flow/ease to follow, clarity etc. every time I say anything. 10 weeks in I'm noticeably more articulate than I've ever been.

[snarf21]

This feels like a far better reason to code your own; when your use case is just a bit too niche to ever be prioritized but you otherwise need a similar tool.