Dictano
One price, paid once

Pay once. Dictate forever.

Dictation is not a service, so Dictano is not a subscription. Buy it once, keep it, and never think about it again.

  • No subscription, ever
  • Works on 2 Macs
  • Free updates forever
  • 30 days to change your mind

Dictano lifetime license

$29 once

2 Macs · free updates · no renewal

Buy Dictano, $29

Apple Silicon, macOS 13+. The key arrives by email.

30-day money-back guarantee. Not for you? Email [email protected] within 30 days and you get the money back. No form, no reason needed.

Already bought it? Download Dictano

Everything is included

  • Unlimited dictation. No word counts, no monthly minutes, no fair-use ceiling. Talk as much as you want.
  • Runs fully on your Mac. Whisper large-v3-turbo transcribes locally. Your audio never touches a server, so there is nothing to leak.
  • Works with every app. Mail, Slack, Notes, Xcode, your terminal. Dictano types into whatever has the cursor.
  • Push to talk or toggle. Hold the hotkey to dictate and release to stop, or tap it to start and tap again to finish.
  • Your own hotkey. Five presets, changed from the menu bar, applied without a restart.
  • Your language. Pin English, Spanish, German, Portuguese or French from the menu bar, or leave it on auto-detect, which covers the other languages Whisper knows.
  • Punctuation that closes. Sentences come out finished, not run together, so you paste text instead of repairing it.
  • Last 10 transcriptions. Kept in the menu bar. Click one to copy it again.
  • Free updates forever. Every future version is included. The app tells you when one is out.
  • 2 Macs per license. Your laptop and your desktop. Replacing one? Email us and the old seat is freed.
  • 3 MB, no account. No sign-up, no telemetry, no Electron. Signed and notarized by Apple.

What the same year of dictation costs elsewhere

Dictation apps drifted into subscriptions because the cloud ones pay a bill for every minute you talk. Dictano does not have that bill, so it does not send you one.

App Price One year Where audio goes
Dictano $29 once $29 On-device
Wispr Flow Pro $15/month, or $144/year $144 Cloud
SuperWhisper Pro $8.49/month $102 On-device
SuperWhisper lifetime $249.99 once $249.99 On-device
Voibe $149 once $149 On-device

Competitor prices checked October 2026. Against Wispr Flow's $15 monthly plan, Dictano has paid for itself by month two, and every month after that is free.

Nothing is metered

Cloud dictation counts your words because each one costs the vendor money. Dictano transcribes on your own chip, so a 40-minute ramble costs exactly what a two-word note costs: nothing.

Nothing is uploaded

The recording is written to a temporary file on your Mac and transcribed there; the next dictation overwrites it. There is no account, no sync and no server, so the audio has nowhere to go.

Nothing to renew

The license is checked when the app launches. Offline, it keeps dictating for 14 days after the last successful check, so a flight or a dead Wi-Fi week does not stop you. No renewal, no subscription to lapse.

Made by one developer

Dictano is not a startup with a runway to burn and a subscription to grow into. It is one person's app, sold directly, priced at what it is worth once rather than what it could extract monthly. That is also why it is 3 MB and starts instantly: there is no product manager asking for an onboarding flow.

The trade works both ways. You get a tool that will not be discontinued out from under you the way Dragon was on the Mac, and bug reports reach the person who writes the code. Payments and license keys are handled by Polar, so your card details never touch this site.

Questions about the price

Is $29 really the whole price? +
Yes. One payment, no renewal, no upsell, no pro tier holding features back. Every update after it is free, including the ones that add features.
Is there a free trial? +
No, and that is deliberate. A trial that ends mid-sentence is worse than no trial: you build the habit and then the app takes it away. The 30-day guarantee does the same job the other way round, because you carry no risk at any point.
How do I get the app after paying? +
The license key arrives by email the moment the payment goes through. Download Dictano, open the menu bar icon, paste the key in, and you are dictating.
How many Macs does one license cover? +
Two. If you replace a Mac, email [email protected] and the old seat is released so the key activates on the new one. A hardware upgrade does not cost you a license.
Is there a subscription I am missing? +
There is none anywhere in the app. Dictano has no server to pay for: the speech model runs on your Mac, so there is no per-minute cost to pass on to you.
Does the price go up later? +
The license you buy today keeps working at the price you paid, forever, whatever the price becomes for new buyers.
What if I buy it and change my mind? +
You have 30 days to email [email protected] and get the money back. No form and no reason needed, and nobody is going to try to talk you out of it.
What do I need to run it? +
A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer) on macOS 13 or later. The app is 3 MB and downloads its 547 MB speech model once, on first launch.

$29, and 30 days to be sure

One payment, two Macs, every update from here on. If it does not earn its keep in the first month, you get the money back.

Buy Dictano, $29 See how it compares