The rule
Sayframe charges for exactly one thing: work that costs us money every time you do it. Everything that runs on your Mac is free, because your Mac is already paid for and running it costs us nothing.
That is the whole rule. Transcription on-device, cleanup with a local model, meeting capture, the transcript Library, custom modes, export: all free, with no account and no word cap. Sayframe Cloud, where our servers and an upstream speech-to-text provider bill us per minute, is the subscription.
Why not charge for the app anyway
Plenty of good Mac apps do, and it is a legitimate model. The problem is what it does to the incentives once you add a cloud lane. If a paid app also sells cloud minutes, the local path quietly becomes the lesser one: it gets less attention, it stays a version behind, and eventually the default flips to the cloud because that is where the revenue lives.
Keeping local free and unpaid removes that pressure. Local is not the free trial for the real product. It is the product, and the hosted lane is a convenience you buy when you need it.
What the subscription actually pays for
Pro is $10/mo, or $90/yr which works out to $7.50/mo. It buys Sayframe Cloud transcription with 600 minutes a month and provider failover, so a provider having a bad day is our problem rather than yours.
The minute ceiling is printed on the pricing page instead of buried in terms, because an unlimited claim on a service with real per-minute cost is a promise that gets quietly withdrawn later. Publishing the number means we have to live with it.
The part that is not shipped
Hosted AI cleanup and hosted meeting summaries are on the roadmap and are not part of Pro. The cost router and usage budget that would let us price a hosted language-model lane honestly do not exist yet, and selling a feature before its economics exist is how a subscription ends up with a fair-use policy that changes every quarter.
Cleanup itself works today, either on a local model at no cost, or on your own provider key with no markup from us. If hosted cleanup with nothing to configure is what you need this month, a cloud-first dictation app will serve you better than waiting for ours.
What this means when you evaluate us
Install it, use it for a week without an account, and never pay us anything. That is a supported way to use Sayframe, not a loophole. The trial for the hosted lane only starts the first time you actually use hosted transcription, so evaluating the free product does not burn it.
If the hosted lane never becomes useful to you, the free product is still the whole dictation app. That is the intended outcome, not a failure of the funnel.