A Mac dictation app you buy once

Why dictation became a subscription

Cloud dictation costs the provider money every minute you talk: servers, models, bandwidth. A subscription is the honest price of that architecture. On-device dictation costs the provider nothing per use. Once the app is on your Mac, your dictation is between you and your Mac. That is why it can be sold once. The two architectures, in detail.

What you get

• Pro unlocks unlimited words. Everything else is already in the free plan, which is 4,000 words a week.
• The license covers 3 Macs. You activate once per Mac; the daily check runs on the Mac with cryptography, and an activated Mac stays on Pro even if our server never answers again.
• Every 1.x version is included. When there is a 2.0, you will be told what it costs and whether you want it. Nothing you have stops working.
• 30 day refund, no questions.

The license page says the same in the words of the checkout.

What "forever" does and does not mean

The license does not expire. What can expire is the platform: DeftNib runs on macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon, and a future macOS could change the APIs the app depends on. That risk exists for every native app and is not something a subscription fixes. What a one-time license does fix is the other risk: paying for a tool you have stopped using.

The math

A subscription at the low end of the category (US$ 12 a month) over one, two and three years, next to US$ 49 once. The table at the top of this page has the three lines; this is the three year one.

Other buy-once dictation apps

There are several, and the honest thing to say is that "buy once" is now common among on-device Mac dictation apps. What differs is what sits above the engine: whether the app punctuates without being told, removes fillers, applies spoken corrections, handles Spanish as a main case, and how much it weighs. The comparison pages go through the ones people ask about most: Wispr Flow and superwhisper.

Questions