u/xiduzo

A while ago I “bought” a pocket voice recorder. It turned out I needed yet another subscription, so “my” device turned into another thing I am renting.

I am sick and tired of my life turning into a subscription. Subscriptions and cloud tie-ins are a nuisance we have come to accept unquestionably, like frogs in a pot. I hate this with pure passion.

So, a bit out of spite, I build yap-yap.app, a fully local-first voice and meeting recorder.

I've been lurking on this subreddit for a while and seen many great products. Some are either fully open source (kudos to you!) and/or self-hostable, which I believe is challenging to do for your average Joe. Others offer some way or form of a subscription, mainly in locking features for “free” tier users.

yapyap is different, I think. It is a one-time purchase, after 7 days of free and full access, with all future updates included.

A fair price for a fair product, like (good) software used to be. I believe this model can still work.

Check it out and grill me, either here or at hello@yap-yap.app

Cheers. 🤙

P.S., the mobile companion app (yapyap go) is free of charge regardless, forever. Pinky promise. I am now stress-testing the local transcription and polishing the UI a bit and will release version 2.0 soon. So stay tuned.

I have recently launched my product, and personally, I am very fond of the UI. Which I guess tends to happen when you have stared at the same thing for God knows how long.

I do get mixed responses, though; some people love it and praise me with a "the setup and everything in the UI has been very intuitive" and some come back with "but imo needs a better ui design"

So I ask for your honest, raw, first impression feedback.

I just dumped a few screenshots of (recent) product development, no cherry-picked slick UIs. I've tweaked a few things here and there along the road already, so you might see a few inconsistencies.

I am not sure if this helps or makes the review messier than it should 👁️👄👁️.

TL;DR

I've seen some similar products doing a giveaway, but they still trick you into some aftersales later on. In-app purchases, subscription based processing, the whole shebang.

I am the maker of https://yap-yap.app/ and the first 20 of you can get it for free forever using `WEBSOFTGIVEAWAY` via https://buy.polar.sh/polar_cl_t4jlxmujyqcgOEFAys1Tf0heX7mUDDFDaf6Tc2hLmpa

No strings attached.

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A little back story.

I got sick and tired of paying subscriptions for everything in my life.

The latest addition? A transcription app that was charging me every month to upload my conversations to their servers.

So I built the opposite.

yapyap records and transcribes conversations entirely on your machine. Speaker identification, summaries, action items, custom analysis. All local. No account.

No bot is joining your calls, and no audio is leaving your device.

The parts I'm most stubborn about:

🔒 Nothing leaves your device.
Transcription, diarization, and the AI analysis all run on your hardware. Not “encrypted in transit.” Not “we don't train on your data”. Just: it never goes anywhere.

💸 You buy it once.
No monthly fee, no lock-in, and no archive holding your words hostage. Your recordings stay searchable, exportable, and yours. Forever.

🔍 It's a memory, not a transcript dump.
Everything you've ever recorded is searchable, and you can point custom analyses (“lenses”) at any conversation.

📱 There's a phone app too
For the conversations that don't happen at your desk. It syncs to your desktop over your network and no cloud in between.

Software used to work this way. I still believe it can.

I'd genuinely love your feedback!

Own your voice again.

I am a teacher in (digital) design education and noticed my students were struggling to work with Arduinos. Even with AI, the Arduino IDE and C++ are an uphill battle to overcome.

So I built Microflow. A visual tool for wiring up interactive prototypes (Figma / web) to real hardware.

It sits in between Scratch (super basic) and TouchDesigner (super advanced).

It is completely free and open source, as it is mostly made to support my students; perhaps it can also help others!

Check it out at https://microflow.tech/ or check the code at https://github.com/xiduzo/microflow

It can control and listen to numerous actuators and sensors and works with Figma, MQTT, and local LLMs.

I recently bought a 120-bucks device (https://heypocket.com/ not a sponsor; please don't buy this device!) to find out it only really works if I have a “pro” subscription.

So out of frustration (and a bit of anger), I built my own tool to operate fully local on the devices you already own and that most likely use the same FREE (!!!) open software.

It's working, and I am personally happy with it. To see if there is some broader wish for such a tool and if I should polish and release it, please let me know at https://yap-yap.app/ !