The plans
No card is needed to start. You only add payment details if you upgrade.
Prices above are what you pay on the desktop app or the website. Pro
bought through the iOS app costs $9.99/month or $99.99/year, because
Apple sells it. It’s the same subscription and the same account — buy it
wherever you prefer. iOS covers the
difference and how App Store billing is managed.
The cloud word limit
The Free plan includes 2,000 words per rolling 7 days of OpenWhispr Cloud transcription. Free forever — it isn’t a trial and it doesn’t expire. Three things worth knowing, because they’re the ones people write in about: It’s a rolling window, not a weekly reset. There’s no Monday when the counter goes back to zero. Instead, each transcription stops counting once it’s more than 7 days old. So if you used your 2,000 words last Tuesday, they free up again this Tuesday. Only OpenWhispr Cloud counts. Local models and your own API keys are unlimited on every plan, and neither touches this number. If you’re regularly hitting the limit and don’t want to upgrade, switching to a local model removes it entirely — see Cloud vs local processing. We don’t cut you off mid-transcription. The check happens when a transcription starts, so a single long recording can carry you past 2,000 words rather than stopping halfway. You’ll be over your limit afterwards, not left with half a transcript. You can see where you stand in Settings → Account.Audio file size limits
These apply when you upload a file or paste a URL in the Upload view. They depend on how you’re processing audio, not just on your plan:
A 45-minute MP3 recorded at a typical bitrate is usually 40–65 MB, so it
will exceed the 25 MB limit on the Free plan and with your own API keys. A
45-minute recording is comfortably within the 500 MB limit on a paid plan.
If a file is too large, OpenWhispr tells you before it uploads anything — you
won’t lose a long upload to a limit you didn’t know about.
URL downloads — YouTube links and direct audio or video URLs — are capped at
500 MB, and the same processing limits above then apply to the downloaded file.
Using the REST API or the CLI directly? The 500 MB figure above is the
desktop app’s limit: it splits large files into smaller pieces and reassembles
the result for you. The public
POST /api/v1/transcribe endpoint (beta; Pro or
Business plan) accepts 4 MB per request; the CLI splits larger files for you
when ffmpeg is installed, and with the desktop app running it transcribes
locally with no size limit at all. See Transcription.