When we sat down to price Wispr Back, the tempting move was to copy the dictation apps: one low price, "unlimited," done. We couldn't — and the reason is worth being honest about, because it shapes the whole product.
Speaking costs more than listening
Transcribing your voice into text is cheap; the marginal cost is close to nothing, which is why dictation apps can promise unlimited words. Generating a natural human voice from text is the opposite — every minute of speech is a real bill from a real model. The best studio voices cost meaningfully more than the everyday ones.
So "unlimited premium voice" at a low flat price isn't a pricing strategy — it's a slow way to go broke. And a tool that quietly bankrupts the person building it doesn't stay around to help you.
The floor is free, and it's real
Every Mac already has a capable on-device voice. It costs us nothing, works offline, and never leaves your machine. So we made it the floor under every plan — free and unlimited, forever.
That changes what running out of minutes even means. On most tools, hitting your limit is a wall: a hard stop, an upsell, a dead feature. On Wispr Back, when your cloud minutes run out, narration simply continues on the on-device voice. Never a hard stop, never a surprise charge. You pay to stay on the lovelier voices, not to keep the app working.
You pay for the voice, not the minute
That's the honest version of our pricing. The free tier gives you a taste of the cloud voices and unlimited on-device narration. Paid tiers add generous everyday minutes and a bucket of premium studio voices. And a cost-weighted meter runs underneath so that no matter how you mix voices, we can keep the lights on and you're never billed a rupee you didn't expect.