One-time purchase dictation for Mac
A few Mac dictation apps still sell a licence rather than a plan. Kana is one of them: $9.99, paid once, for up to three Macs. Here are the others, and what the difference in price buys.
What the payment covers
Dictation into any app, unlimited file transcription with plain text, SRT, VTT and Markdown export, custom vocabulary, and translation of a finished dictation on the machine. One licence, three Macs, no renewal, and no upgrade tier holding any of it back.
It keeps working after you stop paying attention to it
A licence buys the copy you already have, and that copy goes on running. Recognition happens on your Mac, so no server has to stay up for transcription to work and no account can lapse underneath you. Switch the wifi off and it behaves the same.
The other apps you can buy outright
| App | What it costs |
|---|---|
| Kana | $9.99 once, up to three Macs |
| superwhisper | Free tier, $8.49 a month, $84.99 a year, or $249.99 once |
| MacWhisper | Free tier, then €64 once for Pro, with lifetime updates |
| VoiceInk | One-time, $29 for one Mac up to $69 for three, or free if you build it yourself |
| Voice Type | $19.99 once on the Mac App Store, after a 7-day trial |
| LumeVoice | $14.99 a month, $79.99 a year, or $249 once. Three-day trial, no free tier |
| Voibe | $7.50 a month, $59 a year, or $149 once. 7-day trial, 30-day refund |
| Voicy | $8.49 a month on annual billing, Teams $6.79 a user, or $260 once. 30 minutes of recording free to trial |
Prices as each maker publishes them. Several of these sell a plan alongside the licence, and the price says so. Every name links to a longer comparison.
Where the others are worth the difference
MacWhisper is the better buy if you edit recordings: speaker labels, a transcript editor synced to playback, and subtitle timing you can correct by hand, none of which Kana has. VoiceInk is GPL v3, so you can read it, build it in Xcode and run it for nothing, and its Modes switch a whole configuration per app where Kana switches only the rewriting instruction. Voice Type runs on Intel Macs and handles over a hundred languages, against 22 here on Apple Silicon alone.
The part that is sold monthly
AI rewriting is $4.90 a month or $49 a year, because each rewrite calls a model and that call has a cost. The subscription includes the app rather than sitting on top of it. Buying the app first and adding rewriting later does not refund or credit the $9.99.
Fourteen days before any of it
The whole app runs for 14 days with no card and no account. Nothing to cancel, and nothing uploaded while you decide.