Granola + Wispr Flow in One Mac App — and the Dictation Half Is Free

If you talk to your Mac for a living, you're probably paying for it twice. Once for a meeting-notes app — Granola runs about $18 a month. And once for a dictation app — Wispr Flow is about $12 a month. That's roughly $30 a month for two subscriptions that do, at bottom, the same job: turning your speech into text.

They live in different menu bars, bill on different dates, and each routes your voice through its own cloud.

MeetingVault folds both jobs into one Mac menu-bar app. The meeting half costs $9 a month after a free trial. The dictation half costs nothing — free, forever, no card.

Speak: Free Dictation Into Any App

Hold Ctrl+Option and talk. Release, and your words land as text in whatever app has focus — Mail, Slack, a code editor, a browser form. That's the entire interface. There's no window to switch to, no account to create, and no card to enter, because Speak is free permanently. Not free-for-14-days. Free.

If you've been searching for a free Mac dictation app that isn't a limited demo of a paid one, that's the pitch. And if you're a Wispr Flow user doing the math on $12 a month, this is a Wispr Flow alternative you can use without ever paying us anything.

The dictation is genuinely local. Speak runs on Apple's on-device speech stack, so your voice is processed on your Mac's own silicon — local dictation in the literal sense. No audio is uploaded, buffered on a server, or "processed to improve the service." It never leaves the machine.

Listen: On-Device Meeting Transcription

The paid half is for meetings. Hit record and MeetingVault captures the conversation — no bot joins your call — then transcribes it on-device and files the transcript in a searchable library on your Mac. Attribution is simple and honest: what you said is marked Me, what everyone else said is marked Them.

The meeting audio itself is deleted automatically once transcription finishes. What remains is the transcript, on your disk, searchable when you need to find what was agreed three weeks ago. Nothing syncs to a cloud, because there is no cloud.

Listen is free for 14 days. After that it's $9 a month — a founding rate held for the first 500 subscribers.

Both Halves, One Rule: Nothing Leaves Your Mac

Speak and Listen share a single engine: Apple's speech stack on macOS 26, running on Apple silicon. That shared foundation is the real differentiator, because it means the privacy story isn't a policy — it's an architecture. There's no server to send audio to. There's no account, so there's nothing to log in to and nothing to breach. Whether you're dictating an email or transcribing an hour-long client call, the processing happens on hardware you own.

Granola and Wispr Flow are both good tools, and both are cloud services. Your meeting notes or your dictated words pass through their servers on the way back to you. If that trade doesn't bother you, fine. If it does — if you'd rather have on-device meeting transcription on your Mac than a retention policy to read — that's the gap MeetingVault exists to fill, and what makes it a different kind of Granola alternative rather than a cheaper clone.

What It Doesn't Do

Honesty beats a feature grid. MeetingVault does not generate AI summaries. It doesn't extract action items. It doesn't label speakers by name — attribution is Me and Them, nothing more. There's no Windows version and no cloud sync between machines. If your workflow depends on auto-generated summaries and task lists, Granola does that well and we don't pretend to. MeetingVault is transcript-first: the full, verbatim record of what was said, kept local and searchable.

The Math

Two subscriptions at roughly $30 a month become one at $9. Over a year, that's around $250 back in your pocket — for tools that, in exchange, stop uploading your voice.

And if meetings aren't your problem — if all you want is to hold a key and talk instead of type — the price is zero. Speak doesn't expire, doesn't nag, and doesn't ask for a card. Use it for free, indefinitely, and pay only if the meeting side earns it.

One requirement to know before you download: MeetingVault needs macOS 26 (Tahoe) and an Apple silicon Mac. That's the combination that ships the on-device speech stack everything above is built on.

Two speech tools, one app, one bill — and half of it is no bill at all.