You have found OpenWhispr: MIT licensed, cross-platform, free, unlimited local dictation. So why pay for a Mac dictation app? The honest answer is not privacy, and not price.
What OpenWhispr genuinely gets right
Its source is public and it is free for personal and commercial use. It is signed and notarised by Gizmo Labs Inc, so macOS opens it without a warning, and it is actively maintained. It runs on macOS 12 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel, plus Windows and Linux. Local dictation is free, with no word cap or account.
Its own wording: local means your words are transcribed on your own computer by open models, nothing sent to them. Switch the cloud on and your audio goes out to be transcribed, then it is gone the moment the words come back. Public source means you can check that yourself. Installing the release needs no terminal. It is a suite: meeting transcription with speaker separation, an agent mode, notes, team spaces, an API.
Free, offline and polished is a configuration
Its docs credit the clean-up layer for making dictation read like writing: fillers removed, grammar and punctuation fixed, wording left alone. It is on by default and runs your text through a language model whose provider you choose: their hosted cloud, your own key, a self-hosted endpoint, or a local model their docs call slower than cloud options on most hardware.
The speech model is a decision too: Whisper models from roughly 75 MB to about 3 GB, with a different engine per mode. Free, offline and polished is not a state you arrive in, it is one you assemble, and the own-key branch carries a bill worth costing out.
What one payment buys instead
Dictato ships it assembled: six onboarding steps, two permissions, a self-test that blocks setup until pasting works. No account in the app, no API key field, no provider to pick. The engine is pre-selected: on macOS 26 the built-in Apple engine needs no download, below that a one-time download of roughly 2.3 GB.
One layer runs on every dictation, with no setup, even with all AI off: hesitations and repeats stripped, first letters of sentences capitalised, spoken numbers, dates, times and amounts written out last, after any AI pass. That part is English and French only. Commas, sentence breaks and paragraphs come from an optional on-device AI clean-up, off on a fresh install, switched on with Auto-correct or a per-app profile (a one-time local model of roughly 3.4 GB); that structure pass covers French, English and German on the local model, or macOS 26 on the built-in path. Paragraphs split by topic, never by pause length.
No audio and no transcribed text is sent anywhere: no cloud transcription, no cloud AI, no API key field. 19.99 EUR once, seven-day trial, updates included.
Pick OpenWhispr if, pick Dictato if
Pick OpenWhispr if you are on Windows or Linux, on an Intel Mac, if you want to read the source, if you want meetings and agents in one app, or if you refuse to pay anything.
Pick Dictato if you are on Apple Silicon with macOS 14 or later and want one path instead of a set of choices. Our comparison with VoiceInk and survey of Whisper apps cover the rest.