Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost?

$29 during launch, regular price $39 one-time. One payment — no subscription. All local features are included. There’s a 30-day free trial (full features, no credit card) and a 30-day money-back guarantee if you buy and change your mind.

How does activation work? Do I need to be online?

No — activation is fully offline. After you buy, you receive a license key by email. Then: Settings → License → paste your key → it activates instantly. There is no activation server and no network call. The key is verified on your machine against a public key built into the app. You can activate on a plane.

What happens when the trial ends?

The trial runs 30 days from first launch. When it ends, new capture (dictation and meeting recording) is gated until you enter a license key — but you can still open and browse everything you already recorded. We gate compute, never your files.

I reinstalled / moved to a new machine — do I lose my license or restart my trial?

Your license key re-activates anywhere. Paste the same key into Settings → License on the new install or new machine and you’re licensed again — because verification is offline, the key itself is all you need.

On macOS, the trial clock is stored in the system Keychain, so it survives a reinstall — reinstalling does not grant a fresh 30-day trial. (This is deliberate.) On Linux, the trial clock uses the system keyring where one is available; on a headless box without a secret store, trial-state persistence is not guaranteed. If that’s your setup, get in touch.

What do future updates cost?

v1.x updates are free to you as an owner, through at least the current and the next major macOS release. A future v2.0 — reserved for a genuinely large new local capability — would be a paid upgrade at an owner discount. Your v1 license keeps working forever; it just doesn’t unlock v2.

Technically, your key carries a major-version entitlement: a v1 key validates every v1 release indefinitely and does not unlock v2. No surprise subscription is ever introduced.

Why is there no login / account?

Because Saykeep has no server and collects nothing about you. There’s nothing to log into. Your license is a key you hold; your data lives in your storage folder; nothing is uploaded to us. A login would only add a way for us to have your data — so we don’t have one. See the privacy page.

Does it really run 100% locally?

For your audio, transcripts, and speaker labels — yes, always: they’re processed on your machine, and you can verify it. We publish NETWORK.md, an exhaustive list of every connection the app can make; with the default local summary endpoint, normal use shows zero connections. Run Little Snitch (macOS) or lsof -i (Linux) and watch. The optional exceptions are the off-by-default update check and — only if you choose one — a remote summary endpoint receiving the transcript text (see the summaries question below).

Is it legal to record my meetings with Saykeep?

It depends on where you and the other participants are — and it’s your responsibility, not ours. Some places are all-party-consent jurisdictions, where every person in a private conversation must agree before it’s recorded. Germany is one — recording someone’s non-public spoken word without consent is a criminal offence there (§ 201 StGB) — and several US states are too, California among them. Most other US states and US federal law follow a one-party rule, and when participants are in different places the stricter rule can apply. Check the law where you are. This FAQ is not legal advice.

What Saykeep does is make recording unmistakably visible so consent is possible in the first place: the recording indicator is always on, and your first meeting shows a consent notice naming the jurisdictions to be aware of. Obtaining the actual consent is up to you.

Can other people in the meeting tell I’m recording?

Not automatically — Saykeep sends nothing into the call, so it can’t announce itself to the other side. What it refuses to do is hide the recording from you: there is no hidden or low-visibility recording mode, and no setting turns the indicator off. Whenever meeting capture is active, the recording state is shown on your screen: the menu-bar icon, the status line (elapsed time plus live audio meters), and the recording card. That’s deliberate. The indicator means you can’t record by accident — announcing the recording to the other participants is still your job, and in all-party-consent places, your legal obligation.

What ends up stored on disk — and can Saykeep clean up after itself?

A meeting is a folder of ordinary files: the audio (Opus), the transcript (JSON and Markdown), and the summary. You choose how long the audio stays: keep it (the default), have Saykeep ask after every meeting, or auto-delete audio older than a number of days you set. The guard rail: audio is only ever deleted after a successful transcript exists, so a failed transcription can never cost you the recording — and transcripts and summaries are never deleted automatically. Beyond that, you can delete any meeting entirely from the recordings browser, erase your Saykeep data — recordings, models, settings — from Settings (a type-to-confirm action), or prune the files yourself — they sit in your folder, in open formats.

Does anything leave my machine?

During normal use — nothing. And the complete list of what can connect is short, published, and checkable. There is no telemetry, analytics, crash reporting, or usage tracking anywhere in the code, and no account or cloud sync. The three connections you could ever see in practice:

That’s the everyday list — the complete annotated inventory, including two setup-path items (an optional Hugging Face token check and the self-hosted model mirror), is reproduced in NETWORK.md on the privacy page. You don’t have to trust us: run Little Snitch and watch Saykeep make zero outbound connections during normal use.

Do I need a GPU or a cloud API for summaries?

Summaries are optional, and you decide where they happen. Point Saykeep at a local server on your own machine (the default, 127.0.0.1) and summaries are fully offline — this is the path that wants a reasonably capable computer. Or use any OpenAI-compatible service you already have, with your own API key — then the transcript text (plus the optional “about you” context note, if you’ve set one in Settings) goes to that provider, and nothing else does. With no endpoint configured, meetings still record, transcribe, and get speaker labels — only the summary step is skipped. Saykeep never bundles or downloads an LLM.

We also plan an optional Saykeep-provided endpoint for people who’d rather not run or rent one themselves. Like everything else here, it will be exactly that — optional: the app you bought works without it today, and always will.

What speech engine does it use — and is local as accurate as the cloud?

Saykeep runs Whisper-family open models locally — mlx-whisper on Apple Silicon, faster-whisper on Linux. In Argmax’s published WhisperKit benchmark (arXiv 2507.10860), on-device Whisper-family systems matched or beat the big cloud transcription services in that test.

No speech model is perfect — names and jargon are where they all stumble, which is exactly what Saykeep’s custom vocabulary is for, and your transcripts are plain text you can edit. Speaker labels (diarization) are good but not flawless; that’s why you can rename and fix them.

What languages does it support?

The Whisper model family is multilingual — it supports dozens of languages out of the box, and Saykeep exposes the model’s language handling directly. Quality varies by language (it is strongest in English); the 30-day trial is the honest way to check yours.

How much disk space do the models need?

Plan for a few gigabytes. Models download once, on first run, with a visible progress bar, and are listed in NETWORK.md — the exact size depends on the model you pick in Settings.

Why does my card statement say “LEMSQZY*”?

Checkout is processed by Lemon Squeezy, our merchant of record — they handle the card, VAT and sales tax, so your statement shows their descriptor, not ours. Your 30-day money-back guarantee applies regardless. Reply to your receipt.

What happens if Saykeep shuts down?

Nothing breaks. Your license verifies offline — there is no activation server that could go away. Your recordings, transcripts, and summaries are ordinary files in your own storage folder, in open formats (Opus audio, JSON and Markdown transcripts) you can read without us. There is no cloud to sunset and no subscription to cancel. Software you bought stays software you own.

What are the system requirements?

macOS 14.2+ on Apple Silicon for the notarized Mac app; a Linux build exists for advanced users. Full detail on the Download page.