Dictation without a subscription.
Every serious dictation app bills you monthly, forever. Voxmelt is $49 once. Not a promotion, not an introductory rate - the software runs on your machine, so there is no meter to run.
What dictation costs you over time
Cloud dictation lists at about $15 a month. Voxmelt Pro is $49, once. You can check this one without trusting a single thing we say about accuracy or privacy.
| After | Cloud dictation at $15/mo | Voxmelt Pro | You keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 year | $180 | $49 | $131 stays yours |
| 3 years | $540 | $49 | $491 stays yours |
| 5 years | $900 | $49 | $851 stays yours |
Break-even lands around month 4. After that the subscription keeps charging and Voxmelt does not. Competitor figure is the published list price at the time of writing; check it yourself before you take our word for it. Studio is $99 once if you want the flagship models and the prompt and code template packs.
A subscription usually pays for a server. There is no server here.
Cloud dictation has to bill monthly. Every word you speak is uploaded, transcribed on hardware they rent, and sent back, so their cost recurs and your price recurs with it. That is not greed, it is arithmetic.
Voxmelt moves the work to hardware you already bought. Your processor does the listening. Your graphics card, if you have one, runs the AI that polishes the text. Our servers handle sign-in and downloads and nothing else - no audio, no transcripts, not a single word of what you dictate. With no recurring cost on our side, a recurring charge on yours would just be a business model.
No per-minute meter
Dictate for eight hours. The cost is identical, because the compute is yours and always was.
No account required to work
Sign-in exists for your licence. Pull the network cable and dictation carries on regardless.
No switch we can flip
The app does not phone home to transcribe, so nothing we do later can stop it working.
It is not a stripped-down one-time tier
The usual trick with lifetime pricing is that the lifetime version is the weak one. This is the whole product.
- Unlimited local dictation. NVIDIA Parakeet v3 on your CPU. 11.9% word error across our five published clips, 2.0% on fast natural speech. Whisper tiny through large-v3 ships too if you want the GPU engine.
- AI text polish. A local model rewrites, summarises, translates, or restyles what you said, in one click. Needs an NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB or more.
- 80+ one-click templates. Emails, chat replies, commit messages, meeting recaps, study notes, coding prompts, across six personas - plus your own custom templates.
- Local voiceover. 32 voice combinations, speed control, WAV export. Runs on the CPU, so no per-character TTS billing.
- Mini Mode and hotkeys. A floating pill that dictates into any app, a global hotkey, auto-copy, auto-paste, and hands-free voice commands.
- Every update. Updates are included. There is no version you get cut off from and no upgrade fee.
The accuracy figures come from our published benchmark, where we also show the clips Parakeet loses on and note that Whisper large-v3 on a GPU is still the more accurate engine overall. See the full comparison against Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, Otter AI and Dragon.
The ones people actually ask about paying once
Is Voxmelt really a one-time payment?
Yes. Pro is $49 and Studio is $99, charged once. There is no renewal date, no recurring mandate, and nothing to cancel. The licence stays on your account and keeps working on the version you bought and every update to it.
How can you charge once when everyone else charges monthly?
Because we do not run the transcription. Cloud dictation tools bill monthly because every word you speak costs them server time, so their price has to recur to cover a cost that recurs. Voxmelt transcribes on your own processor and polishes text with a model on your own graphics card. There is no per-word cost on our side to pass on, so there is no reason to bill you every month.
What do I actually get for $49?
Unlimited local dictation with no daily cap, unlimited AI text polish on the everyday template set, all 32 voiceover voices with WAV export, five custom templates, and priority support. Studio adds the AI Prompt and Code template packs, every model in the catalog including the flagships, and 30 custom templates.
Is there a free version?
Yes, and it stays free. 60 minutes of dictation a day plus a daily allowance of AI runs, with no card and no expiry. Every install also starts with a 15-day trial of the full Studio feature set so you can judge the paid tiers on your own hardware and your own voice first.
Do I need an NVIDIA GPU?
Not for dictation. Speech-to-text runs on your CPU using NVIDIA's Parakeet v3 model, which scored 11.9 percent word error across our five published clips and 2.0 percent on the fast natural speech clip. Voiceover runs on the CPU too. An NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB or more of VRAM is only needed for the AI text polish, which uses a local model through Ollama.
What happens if the company disappears?
The app keeps working. It does not check in with a server to transcribe, so there is no switch anyone can flip that stops your dictation. That is a property of running locally rather than a promise we are asking you to trust.
Are there per-minute or word limits on the paid tiers?
No. Paid tiers have no daily cap, no minute metering, and no word quota. Dictate for eight hours a day if you want to; the cost is the same because the compute is yours.
Try it before you pay anything
Every install starts with 15 days of the full Studio feature set, no card. After that the free tier keeps going at 60 minutes a day, and $49 buys Pro outright whenever you decide it is worth it.