Launched this week
Oats
100% Free, private meet notes that never leave your computer
22 followers
100% Free, private meet notes that never leave your computer
22 followers
Most meeting notetakers don't send a bot anymore but they still upload your conversations to their cloud, and most cost $18+/mo. Oats doesn't. It runs entirely on your Mac, transcription on-device, nothing leaves your laptop, no account, no subscription. It's free because it runs on your machine, not my cloud. Type your notes; Oats blends them with the transcript into a clean write-up. Bring your own model key, or stay fully offline. Mac + Windows → oatsnote.com
the on-device transcription is the actual differentiator here, congrats on shipping that. question about the "bring your own model key" option though - once you plug in a key, does the transcript get sent out to that model's API for the write-up step, or is BYOK only used to swap which local model does the blending? asking because "never leaves your laptop" is a strong claim and I want to know if it still holds once someone opts into BYOK for better summaries.
@galdayan
You are right 🙂 but by default Everything is local and transcribing on your machine (Whisper/Parakeet) and the write-up as well (Ollama/builtin). In that setup, nothing ever leaves your machine.
The cloud only comes in if you turn it on, and it's your choice at every step:
- Transcription - Local (default), or with Deepgram/Assembly if you'd like.
- Write-up - Defaults to local, or you can bring your own key for Anthropic / OpenAI / Google.
You can switch either of those on and that piece of your data goes to the provider you selected with your own key.
Also Local models are getting better, fast, so that gap keeps closing. In both cases Either way, your data never hits an Oats server because there isn't one 🙂
@akshayaggarwal99 that's a clean answer, appreciate the step by step breakdown. good to know the default is genuinely local and BYOK is opt-in per feature rather than an all-or-nothing switch. one small suggestion - might be worth a subtle UI indicator (like a badge next to transcription/write-up settings) when cloud is active, so someone doesn't turn on BYOK for one call and forget it's still on for the next one they actually wanted local. not a dealbreaker, just a way to keep the privacy promise foolproof over time.
@galdayan yeah, that's a really good call the privacy promise shouldn't depend on anyone remembering. Adding a small badge next to the transcription + write-up settings (and by the record button) that lights up when a cloud model is on (needs to think about clean UI/UX), so it's obvious at a glance and you never leave it on for a call you meant to keep local. Will Ship it. Thanks for thinking it through with me 🙏
@akshayaggarwal99 nice, glad it turned into something concrete. good luck with the launch
Using it from a week for my sales calls from a week. It works like magic.
Very comprehensive and accurate transcripts.