Updated September 1, 2026 · By Sumbat.T

Spokenly Review 2026: Is It Really Free, and What Pro Costs

What Spokenly actually is

Spokenly is a dictation app for macOS, Windows, Linux and iPhone. You press a shortcut, speak, and your words appear at the cursor in whatever application you are in. The transcription can run entirely on your own machine using local Whisper or Nvidia Parakeet models, or through Spokenly's hosted cloud, or through a third-party provider using your own API key. That three-way choice is the design decision everything else in this review follows from.

It is an indie product rather than a venture-backed one, and the scale is real: Spokenly's own site claims 100,000+ active users and a 4.8 App Store rating, and the app has picked up genuine editorial coverage from Lifehacker and CNET alongside an active subreddit. It is not an abandoned side project, and the Windows build was updated in August 2026.

The pricing, and the number that is not on the pricing page

Spokenly's pricing page is unusually honest in structure. It shows three plans, and two of them cost nothing. The headline promise, in Spokenly's own words, is that "everything local is free forever in every plan. Pro only adds the cloud." That is accurate, and it is a better deal than most of this category offers.

There is one thing on the page that is easy to misread, and it is the price. Pro displays as $8.33 /month with Billed $99.99 per year underneath it in smaller type. The page has a Monthly and Yearly toggle, and it loads with Yearly already selected. The monthly price is not shown on the card at all.

Spokenly's pricing page as it loads. The Yearly toggle is preselected, so Pro reads $8.33. Source: spokenly.app/pricing, September 2026.

The real monthly figure is $9.99. It is not hidden exactly, but you have to go looking: it lives in the page's own Offer structured data, which lists "Spokenly Pro Monthly" at 9.99 and "Spokenly Pro Yearly" at 99.99. Click the Monthly toggle and the card updates to match.

The second thing worth reading closely is what actually separates the tiers, because it is not the usual crippled-trial arrangement. The free plan is a complete dictation app with no usage limit. What Pro buys is Spokenly's servers.

Read the Price column against the Models column and the commercial logic is obvious. Running a model on your hardware costs Spokenly nothing, so they give it away without limit. Letting you use your own API key costs them nothing either, so that is free as well. Running a premium model on their hardware costs them real money every time you speak, so that is the thing behind the paywall.

That is a more defensible free tier than a word cap, and it is worth saying plainly: Spokenly is not pretending to be free. Compare it to Wispr Flow, where the free tier is 2,000 words a week on desktop and there is no local option underneath it, and Spokenly's offer is straightforwardly more generous for anyone whose machine can run the models.

If the setup is the part you do not want

Dictate anywhere without downloading a model

BlabbyAI runs in the cloud, so there is no model to pick, no API key to supply and nothing to keep on disk. 60 credits a week free, no card, then $8.49 a month. Windows app or Chrome extension.

Add BlabbyAI to Chrome

Spokenly on Windows: real, but the newest part of the product

"Spokenly Windows" is the single most common follow-up search on this brand, appearing at the top of every related-search block Google shows for it. That is worth pausing on, because the answer in most third-party coverage is wrong. Lifehacker calls it a "Free Mac App". Product Hunt describes "smart voice input for Mac". Two review sites list the platforms as "Mac and iPhone". Spokenly's own homepage title, meanwhile, reads "Free AI Dictation for Mac, Windows, Linux & iPhone".

The vendor is right and the reviews are stale. There is a genuine Windows build: a direct 29MB download for Windows 10 and 11 on 64-bit, distributed from spokenly.app rather than the Microsoft Store, with local and cloud models, 100+ languages, a global hotkey, a recording overlay, system-wide text insertion and in-app auto-updates.

Spokenly's own Windows page. Note the version number: 0.3.20, updated August 2026. Source: spokenly.app/windows.

What the reviews also miss is the caveat Spokenly states itself. Its Windows FAQ says, in its own words, that "The Mac and iOS versions are the most mature, but the Windows build covers the core dictation and transcription flows." The version number backs that up: 0.3.20, which is a pre-1.0 build, against a Mac app that has been shipping long enough to collect a 4.8 rating across a large App Store review base.

One more Windows-specific detail: Spokenly is not on the Microsoft Store, by its own statement, and the installer comes straight from the site. That is normal for indie desktop software, but it matters on a managed work laptop, where installing an unsigned or non-store-distributed executable is often the exact thing IT prevents. If that describes your machine, no desktop dictation app is your answer, and a browser extension is the route that actually works, because it installs into Chrome rather than into Windows.

The privacy claim, and what it actually covers

Spokenly leads on privacy, and in local-only mode the claim is structural rather than promised. Its own site states that local-only mode makes zero network requests, and with on-device models your audio never leaves the machine. That is a stronger guarantee than a policy page, because it is a property of where the computation happens rather than an undertaking about what a company will do with data it holds.

The distinction worth holding onto is that this describes local mode specifically. Spokenly offers three processing routes, and only one of them keeps everything on your machine:

All three are legitimate, and the middle one in particular is a nice touch that few competitors offer. The thing to be conscious of is that moving between them is a setting rather than a reinstall, so it is possible to enable a cloud model for accuracy and quietly change the privacy properties of your setup. If your work is governed by rules about which tools may handle particular material, that is a question for whoever sets that policy where you work, not something a review can settle for you.

The hidden cost of free: your hardware

Free local dictation is a real thing, but it is not costless, and this is the part free-tier arithmetic usually skips. A local model has to be downloaded before you can use it, and it stays on your disk. It then runs on your processor every time you speak, which uses power and generates heat, which on a laptop means battery.

On a modern machine this is genuinely fine, and the whole appeal of the on-device approach is that current laptops are fast enough to make it work. The Spokenly app itself is small, a 20MB download on macOS and 29MB on Windows, but the models are the part that matters for disk and memory, and larger models are both more accurate and heavier to run. That is the trade at the centre of every local dictation tool.

This is the honest dividing line between the local and cloud approaches, and it is why both continue to exist. If your machine is capable and yours to configure, local dictation is excellent and Spokenly is one of the better versions of it. If your machine is old, locked down, or not a desktop at all, the compute has to happen somewhere else, and a cloud tool is not a compromise so much as the only design that fits.

How Spokenly compares to the alternatives

Spokenly sits in a crowded category, and the useful way to read it is by two questions: who does the computing, and what does a month cost if you just want to try it. Every price below is the monthly rate, not the annual-divided-by-twelve figure, because that is the number you actually pay first.

Tool	Cost	Processing	Platforms	The catch
Spokenly	Free forever, Pro $9.99/mo	Local, your keys, or their cloud	macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS	Windows build is version 0.3.20
BlabbyAI	Free tier, then $8.49/mo	Cloud, nothing to configure	Windows app + Chrome extension	Needs a connection to transcribe
Wispr Flow	Free tier, then $15/mo	Cloud only	macOS, Windows, mobile	Free tier is 2,000 words a week on desktop
Superwhisper	Free tier, Pro $8.49/mo	Local or cloud, your choice	macOS, Windows, iOS	Cloud models are paid only
OpenWhispr	Free forever, Pro $8/mo	Local, or their cloud	Windows, macOS, Linux	You download and run the model
VoiceInk	$29 to $69 one-time	Local, on-device	macOS only (Apple Silicon)	No Windows build at all

Three things stand out from that table. Spokenly has the widest platform coverage of the group, running on four operating systems where most competitors manage one or two. It is meaningfully cheaper than Wispr Flow at $9.99 against $15. And its free tier is more generous than anything else here for people who can run local models, because it is not capped by words at all.

The comparison that goes the other way is setup and maturity. Spokenly asks you to choose and download a model, or create an account with an API provider, before you get the free version working. Superwhisper makes a similar bargain at $8.49 for its hosted tier. BlabbyAI takes the opposite approach: everything runs in the cloud, so there is no model, no key and no disk footprint, at $8.49 a month with 60 free credits a week to test it. Which of those is right depends entirely on whether the setup is a pleasure or a chore to you.

Where BlabbyAI fits, and where it does not

If you got this far because Spokenly's price appealed but the model management did not, BlabbyAI is built around the opposite trade-off. There is nothing to download beyond the app itself, no model to choose, no API key to create and no usage of your own CPU. You press Ctrl+Space, speak, and cleaned-up text lands wherever your cursor is.

BlabbyAI on Windows: press Ctrl+Space, speak, and the text appears at the cursor in any app.

There are two products, and which one suits you is mostly a question of what machine you are on. The Windows desktop app types system-wide into any application with a text field, keeps a searchable history of what you dictated, and is the fuller of the two. It is a mature Windows product rather than a port of a Mac one, which is the specific gap Spokenly's 0.3.20 build leaves open.

The Chrome extension is the answer for every machine where a desktop install is not happening: a locked-down work laptop, a Chromebook, a shared computer, or a Mac where you would rather not run a model locally. It works in Gmail, Google Docs, Notion, Slack and anything else with a text field in the browser, and it installs into Chrome rather than into the operating system, which is precisely why it clears the hurdle that stops desktop apps.

The other difference worth naming is what happens to your words after they are transcribed. Blabby's custom modes take a free-form instruction and apply it to whatever you just said, so the same sentence can come out as a formatted Slack message, a cleaned-up paragraph with the filler stripped, or a bulleted list, depending on which mode is active. Spokenly has AI text processing of its own on the paid tier, and both are solving the same problem: raw speech is rarely the text you actually wanted.

A Blabby mode is a free-form instruction applied to whatever you just said, rather than a fixed list of features.

And where BlabbyAI does not fit: it transcribes in the cloud, so it needs a connection, and if a hard requirement of yours is that audio never leaves your machine under any circumstances, a local tool like Spokenly is built for that and Blabby is not. That is a real difference in design rather than a gap in features, and it is the clearest reason someone would choose Spokenly after reading this.

The verdict, section by section

Who should use Spokenly, and who should look elsewhere

Spokenly is a good product and the free tier is not a gimmick. The reason to read past the headline is that the two things most likely to affect your decision, the real monthly price and the state of the Windows build, are both a layer below what the pricing page and the review sites show you.

Frequently asked questions

If you are still comparing, the best dictation apps roundup covers the wider field, Windows speech to text covers the built-in options too, the Chrome extension is the route for machines you cannot install software on, and dictation software is the category overview.