I bought a €120 recorder that needed a subscription

The ads followed me for months. Clip a small AI recorder to your phone, capture every conversation. I knew better and I bought one anyway, because it looked like the way out. Hardware, not software. €120, paid once, no company holding the off switch.

It worked for about a minute. Long enough to learn that it needed their account, their app, and a plan. I was on the free tier. The real deal was €120 to own the object and a subscription, forever, for permission to use it.

The device was redundant before it was crippled

The subscription was the obvious problem. The less obvious one landed a minute later. My phone already recorded fine. It had a microphone, storage, and a record button, and it had all of that before the parcel arrived. The pendant was not adding a capability. It was adding a second object that would eventually be thrown away.

The average person produces roughly 2500 kg of e-waste in a lifetime. A recorder that duplicates a device you already carry is a contribution to that number and nothing else. Two things heading for landfill where zero were needed.

Buying is now licensing

Cory Doctorow has a word for the pattern the subscription belongs to: enshittification. Good to you at first, worse on purpose later, until only the logo is left.

The pendant is a small instance of a larger shift. Click buy and what arrives is a license, not property. A license can be revoked when the plan lapses, when the company pivots, or when the servers are switched off. You paid. Ownership was never part of the transaction. The longer version of this argument is on the manifest.

What yapyap does instead

yapyap records, transcribes, identifies speakers, and summarises, and it does all of that on hardware you already own. The pipeline runs locally. Cloud services are opt-in extensions, never dependencies, and nothing leaves the device without an explicit action. There is no account, because there is no server holding your recordings to log into. Pair a phone once and it records on its own wherever you are, then hands the take to the computer that does the heavy work, so the recorder I was being sold turns out to be the one already in my pocket.

You pay once. Every update is included. Nothing to cancel.

There is one more commitment worth stating plainly, because it is the part that makes the rest credible. yapyap is closed source today, which is my call for now. If I stop, whether I lose interest, run out of money, or get hit by a bus, the code goes public so someone else can carry it. Your copy keeps working either way.

That is the test I want applied to anything sold as a purchase. What you own should not depend on the continued existence, interest, or goodwill of whoever made it.

Further reading

• whisper.cpp — the open speech-to-text engine behind many on-device tools.