You're 30 minutes into a design doc at 11pm. The thought is flowing. Then the app cuts you off: "Free tier limit reached. Upgrade to continue." You've got another 1,200 words to write. You either stop dictating and go back to typing, or you wait until morning to finish the thought cold.
The Infrastructure Trap
Cloud-first voice tools charge by the cloud. Wispr Flow's free tier caps at 2,000 words per month, about eight design docs. Superwhisper charges $8.49/month minimum and still has a cap. Otter.ai meters similarly. The pricing isn't about the quality of the speech-to-text model. They're all using similar base models. The pricing is about the infrastructure cost of transcribing in the cloud and storing the audio.
If you run the transcription locally, there's no infrastructure cost. Whisper-large-v3 achieves 96.3% word accuracy on LibriSpeech and runs on your GPU or CPU with no network call. That's what Recitey does: local Whisper, zero variable cost per transcription.
Why This Changes the Pricing Story
When there's no variable cost, artificial caps make no sense. Cloud providers put caps in because every transcription drains a server. Local transcription costs you your device's compute, which you already own. So Recitey's free tier doesn't count words. It doesn't meter. You dictate until you stop.
That's not a feature marketing point. It's a structural consequence of running the computation on your machine instead of their server.
Marcus, a backend engineer at a Series B fintech, used to hit Wispr's word cap mid-design-doc at least twice a week. He'd lose momentum, close the app, and finish the prose by typing the next morning. He tried Superwhisper for two weeks and ran into the same wall. With Recitey, he noticed something obvious: the app didn't interrupt him. He finished the design doc in one voice session, 3,200 words, no pause.
The Privacy Implication
Running locally also means the audio never leaves your device. For Marcus, and for anyone else who writes code or security design in voice tools, that matters. He'd been hesitant to use cloud dictation for architecture docs because code IP and implementation details are too sensitive to send to a third-party server. Local Whisper solves that without asking for forgiveness.
The Trade-Off
Cloud-based tools offer cloud-based rewrites. Wispr's flow feature polishes your rough dictation into clean prose, that runs on their servers. Recitey's free tier is dictation only. If you want the cloud rewrite, the polish pass, that's the Pro tier. But you get the raw transcription, uncapped, for free.
For Marcus's workflow in Cursor, design docs and Slack threads, that's enough. The raw transcription is already clean. He uses Cursor's autocomplete to refine the prose if it needs work.
Who This Is For
This setup makes sense if you dictate long-form text regularly and you care about keeping code and sensitive details on your device. It makes less sense if you dictate short Slack messages and you're not concerned about data leaving your machine. Wispr and Superwhisper are solid products for their audiences. Recitey is built for developers and technical builders who value local-first architecture.
The bottleneck in your workflow isn't typing speed anymore. It's keeping the thought intact while the tool gets out of your way. Local Whisper does that.