What happens to your recordings if I disappear

Two fair questions to ask about any tool that holds years of your conversations. What happens to my archive if the company stops. And how do I know it is doing what it says.

yapyap is built by one person and ships without published source code, which makes both questions sharper. Here are the answers, including the one you will not like.

If I stop, your copy keeps working

This is the part that is structural rather than a promise.

Nothing in yapyap phones home for permission to run. No server of mine has to stay up. Your recordings are files on your disk in ordinary formats, and your transcripts export to Markdown. If I disappear tomorrow, the application on your computer keeps opening, keeps recording, and keeps its library.

Compare that to a subscription tool. When the company stops, the archive stops being reachable, because the archive was never on your machine.

The source pledge, stated accurately

From the manifest: if I ever stop, the code goes public so somebody else can continue.

That is a public intention and not a legal instrument. There is no escrow, no third party holding a copy under contract, no license that flips automatically if I die or the project goes quiet.

If a promise that survives me being unreliable is what you need, this is not one, and a project that already published its source is. I would rather write that sentence than have you assume otherwise.

Check the privacy claim yourself, in ten minutes

You do not need the source code to test the main claim. Network traffic is visible from outside any application.

1. Install Little Snitch, LuLu, or Wireshark. Your router's logs work too.
2. Record a meeting, transcribe it, and run a write-up.
3. Watch what the process connects to.

The stronger version takes less setup. Turn the wifi off and record a meeting anyway. yapyap should transcribe, label the speakers and produce a write-up with no network at all. If the local-only claim were false, that test would fail in front of you, on any version, at any time, without asking me.

Be clear about what that test proves. Source code tells you what could happen under conditions you have not triggered yet. A network capture tells you what happened while you were watching. Those are not the same, and anybody who says they are is selling something.

Why it is closed

One person builds this, with no funding and no team. yapyap is a one-time purchase, so the compiled application is the entire business. There is no hosted tier, no seats, no support contract, nothing that stays scarce once the code is public.

Meetily solved this with an MIT core and a $120 per user per year tier on top. That works when there is a company to run the commercial half. Open core is a business model before it is an ethical position, and I have not built the business half.

Where open source wins

Handy is the honest counter-argument. Free, permissively licensed, local dictation into any text field, and explicitly built to be forked. Its engine layer puts eight speech engines behind one interface, which is better engineering than most closed applications in this space manage. If its author walks away, you build it yourself that afternoon.

There is more. Speakr is a serious self-hosted transcription server. Verenu is a clean dictation application. OpenWhispr, Scriberr and Anarlog are all open. Omi opened its hardware alongside its software.

These projects give you something yapyap does not, and they give it away. If verifiable source is the part you cannot give up, they are right there, they are good, and I would rather you used one of them than used yapyap while feeling uneasy about it.

What you get if you stay

Everything above is the case against, and I would rather you read it from me than find it later. Here is the case for.

Your recordings are files on your disk, in ordinary formats, on a machine that does not need me. You can prove the local-only claim yourself in ten minutes with the wifi test above, which is a stronger check than most people ever run against a tool they trust. Your phone can record away from your desk and hand the take to your desktop over your own network. Your microphone and the far end of a call stay on separate tracks, so speaker labels cannot cross between them. And one recording becomes as many different write-ups as you need, from templates other people wrote and shared.

None of the open projects above does that set. That is what the €69 is for, and it is charged once.