Reading Meetily's Pro tier: $120 a year, one device

If you are shopping for a meeting recorder that keeps the audio on your own machine, Meetily is the one you will find first, and it deserves to be. It is the benchmark in this category, not the clip-on pendants people usually put next to us.

So this is a comparison written by someone with an obvious interest in the outcome. I have tried to make it the kind of comparison I would trust from a competitor: the numbers dated, the good things said first, and the places where Meetily is simply ahead left in.

What Meetily gets right, before anything else

Meetily is MIT-licensed, and the licence file says so plainly. That is the thing yapyap cannot match and will not pretend to. You can read Meetily's code, audit whether the privacy claims hold, fork it if the company loses interest, and keep running your fork forever without anyone's permission. yapyap is closed source today; why that is, and what happens to your archive if I stop, is written out in what happens to your recordings if I disappear rather than repeated here.

The distribution matches the quality. The repository had about 28,600 stars when I looked on 9 August 2026, with roughly 3,000 forks. That is a real community, an issue tracker with people in it, and a lot of eyes on the code.

And the free edition is not a demo. The Community Edition ships real-time local transcription, AI summaries, audio import, retranscription and local storage, at no cost, under MIT. If transcription and a summary is the whole job, that covers it, and you should use it.

The prices, checked on 9 August 2026

I read these off Meetily's own pricing and checkout pages on 9 August 2026. Vendors change prices, so treat the date as part of the fact.

• Community: $0, MIT, open source.
• Pro trial: 14 days, no card required.
• Pro: $10 per user per month, billed yearly at $120 per user per year. The page shows it as 60% off a $25 monthly rate.
• Enterprise: custom, for 10 or more licences.

Two details in the small print matter more than the headline. The first: "Each Pro license is valid for one device." The second: the checkout FAQ explains how to cancel your subscription through Lemon Squeezy, so Pro renews rather than lapsing quietly. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee, and licence keys arrive by email.

What Pro unlocks, per the feature table: speaker diarisation, enhanced accuracy models, Windows GPU support, a custom AI model connector, custom summary templates, auto-detect meetings, search and replace in transcripts, and PDF/DOCX/Markdown exports. Calendar integration and chat with your meetings are marked "soon" on every tier.

One thing I could not verify, so I am not going to assert it: what happens to Pro features when a paid year lapses. The site says that when the trial ends, Pro features switch off and you keep using Community for free, with your data untouched on your device. It does not say the same in as many words about an expired paid licence, so I do not know, and you should ask them rather than assume.

Where a one-time price lands differently

yapyap is €69, once. The key works on two devices, never expires, and every future update is included. There is a free trial, no card needed, and no account for the core product. Speaker labels are not a tier; they are part of the app.

Put those two shapes side by side over three years, for one person who uses a laptop and a desktop. Meetily Pro is one licence per device, so that is six licence-years at $120, or $720. yapyap is €69, once, and the second machine is included. I am comparing dollars against euros, which is not exact, but no exchange rate closes that gap.

The honest counterweight: at year zero, Meetily costs nothing at all and yapyap costs €69. If transcription and a summary is the whole job, Community wins on price forever, and I would rather say that here than have you discover it after paying me.

Note where the line falls, though. Speaker diarisation is a Pro feature, per the table above. So "who said that" is $120 a year on one device there, and part of the €69 here. Why I think €69 once can hold at all is written out in the arithmetic of selling software once.

What Meetily offers that yapyap does not

Beyond the licence itself: a working enterprise motion with volume licensing and custom deployment, a large community, and years of Windows and macOS releases behind it. Its downloads page also says a native Linux desktop app is still in development with a waitlist, which is one of the few places the ordering runs the other way, since yapyap trials on macOS, Windows and Linux.

Where yapyap is genuinely different is narrower than a feature table suggests: recording on your phone and handing the file to your desktop over your own network, and turning one recording into several different write-ups rather than one summary in the shape I picked. If neither of those describes your problem, Meetily is the better buy.

Which to buy

Meetily Community if free and auditable is the requirement, and transcription plus a summary is the job. For the wider field, I compared nine local-first tools in what actually stays on your computer.

Meetily Pro if you want speaker labels and exports from a project with a real team behind it, you work on one machine, and $120 a year is unremarkable next to what the meetings are worth.

yapyap if you would rather pay once than every year, you work across two machines, or you record away from your desk and want the phone to be the microphone. Speaker labels are not a tier here, the second machine is included, and the €69 does not come round again next August.