OpenWispr is MIT-licensed with one tier: free. No word limits, no subscription, no account to create. Here's how that compares to the rest of the category.
Wispr Flow's desktop free tier caps out at 2,000 words a week (1,000 on iPhone); its Pro tier is $15/month, or $12/month billed annually ($144/year), to remove the cap. superwhisper's free tier works, but is limited to its smaller local models — roughly $8.49/month unlocks the larger on-device models and cloud options. VoiceInk is open source (GPL-3.0) and buildable free from source, but its packaged app is a one-time $29–69 depending on tier, to unlock auto-updates and support.
None of that is a criticism of those products — running cloud transcription costs real money per user, and that cost has to be recovered somehow. It's the structural reason a subscription (or a word cap, or a paid unlock) shows up almost everywhere in this category.
OpenWispr has no backend. Transcription runs on your own device using your own compute, so there's no per-user cloud bill scaling with usage that a subscription would need to cover. That's the entire mechanism — not a promotional "free forever" claim, but a direct consequence of the architecture.
It's also MIT-licensed, which is more permissive than the GPL-3.0 license some open-source competitors ship under: you can read the full source, modify it, fork it, or build your own product on top of it — commercially or not — without a copyleft obligation to release your changes.
Open source and entirely on your device. Install from Google Play on Android, or download the macOS app from GitHub Releases — no account, no sign-up.