Whisper
Speech-to-text that runs on your own machine, free

Open source✓ VerifiedSelf-hostable
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Our take

Accurate transcription with nothing sent anywhere. Once it's on your machine there is no quota, no account and no per-minute price — which changes what you're willing to transcribe.

Watch out

Setup is a real step (Python, a model download, ideally a GPU), and long files on CPU are slow. It's free in money, not in effort.

The free tier, in detail

What you get freeFree and unlimited — code and model weights released under the MIT licence, run locally
Where the limit sitsNo service limits; you pay in CPU/GPU time on your own hardware
Credit card to startNo
Pricing typeOpen source
Last checked2026-07-30 · source
Run it yourselfYes — MIT · repo
Platformswindows, mac, linux
CategoryAudio & voice · Self-hosted / local

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