No card, no trial clock
Mac dictation without a subscription
Paying monthly for dictation feels wrong to a lot of people — it is a utility, not a service. Dictro's free plan is 10,000 words a week with no card, and it stays that way. Here is why that is possible, and where the limit actually bites.
Apple Silicon · macOS 15+ · Free plan · 100% on-device
Follow the architecture
The subscription is a symptom of where the model runs
Dictation priced as a monthly bill is not greed, it is arithmetic. If an app sends your audio to a server to be transcribed, someone pays for that server every single time you speak a sentence. That cost recurs, so the price recurs. It is the honest consequence of a cloud design, and it is why so many dictation tools look the same on the pricing page.
Dictro runs the speech model and the cleanup pass on your own Mac, on the Apple Silicon chip you already paid for. There is no per-word compute bill on our side, which is what makes a free plan that is actually free — rather than a countdown — possible in the first place. The privacy benefit and the pricing benefit come from the same decision.
What you get for nothing
The free plan is the whole app, with a cap
Nothing is held back behind the paywall except the number of words. The recognition model, the filler-word removal, the punctuation, the per-app formatting and the custom vocabulary are all in the free plan.
| What | Free plan | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Words per week | 10,000 | Unlimited |
| Card required | No | Yes |
| Trial clock | None — it does not expire | — |
| Speech recognition | Full, on-device | Full, on-device |
| Filler words and punctuation | Included | Included |
| Per-app formatting | Included | Included |
| Custom vocabulary | Included | Included |
| Ads or upsells in the app | None | None |
| Price | $0 | $10 / month |
Be honest about the cap
Where 10,000 words a week runs out
People speak at roughly 130 to 160 words a minute, so the weekly allowance is about an hour of real dictation. That is a lot more than it sounds like, because dictation is bursty — a sentence here, a paragraph there — rather than an hour of continuous speech.
The free plan covers this comfortably
Daily email and chat replies, notes to yourself, commit messages and pull request descriptions, Slack threads, filling in forms and search boxes, the occasional longer message.
You will hit the cap doing this
Drafting articles, documents or long reports by voice most days, replacing typing wholesale because your hands need the break, or dictating for hours as your primary input method.
The upgrade, plainly
When Pro is worth $10 a month
Pro removes the weekly cap and adds priority support. That is the whole difference. It is worth it when dictation has become how you write rather than something you reach for occasionally — at which point you will know, because you will have hit the cap several weeks running rather than wondering about it in advance.
Until then the free plan is not a demo of a better product. It is the same product, metered.
Dictro runs on Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 15 or later, and on Windows 10 and 11. Recognition and cleanup run on your machine; no audio or transcript is uploaded. Prices shown in USD as of September 2026 — see current pricing.
See the free plan in detail, or read how on-device dictation works and why it is the reason the free plan can exist. If you are comparing several apps, there is a sourced comparison of Mac dictation apps.
Frequently asked questions
What people ask about Dictro
Is there a Mac dictation app that works without a subscription?
Yes. Dictro's free plan gives you 10,000 words a week with no card and no expiring trial — roughly an hour of speaking, every week, indefinitely. There is a paid Pro plan at $10 a month that lifts the cap, but the free plan is not a countdown to it.
Why do most dictation apps charge monthly?
Because most of them send your audio to a server to transcribe it, and that server costs money every time you speak. A recurring bill is the honest consequence of a cloud architecture. Dictro runs the speech model on your own Mac, so there is no per-word cost to pass on and the free plan can stay genuinely free.
What is the catch on the free plan?
The cap. 10,000 words a week is a real limit and heavy daily dictation will reach it. There is no card, no trial clock, no feature held back and no ads — recognition, cleanup and per-app formatting are all in the free plan. If you consistently run out, that is what Pro is for.
How much is 10,000 words a week in practice?
Most people speak somewhere around 130 to 160 words a minute, so 10,000 words is roughly an hour of actual dictation per week. That comfortably covers daily email, chat and notes. It does not cover drafting long documents by voice every day.
Do I need an account to use the free plan?
You sign in once so the weekly allowance can be counted, but no payment details are required at any point on the free plan.