Plaud charges $29.99/month.
We charge $0.
OpenPlaud connects to your Plaud Note and transcribes with your own AI keys — pennies per hour, instead of a subscription. Self-host free, or hosted from $0/mo.
- Works with Plaud Note, Note Pro & NotePin
- Open source
- AGPL-3.0
Here's what you're actually paying for.
Plaud doesn't transcribe your audio — OpenAI, Groq, and similar do. Plaud marks it up and wraps a subscription around it. OpenPlaud lets you pay the provider directly.
OpenAI Whisper: $0.006 per minute. Groq Whisper Large v3: $0.111 per hour. Rates as published by each provider; you pay them directly with your own API key.
What OpenPlaud does.
Four things, in order. Your Plaud Note keeps recording exactly as it does today — we replace everything that happens after.
Pulls recordings from your Plaud Note
Log in with your existing Plaud account. OpenPlaud syncs your recordings in the background — no manual exports, no copy-pasting bearer tokens. Works with Plaud Note, Note Pro, and NotePin.
Transcribes with the AI you choose
Plug in OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Deepgram, or run Llama locally through Ollama. You pay the provider directly — pennies per hour instead of a subscription. Switch providers any time without re-transcribing.
Stores audio where you choose
Local filesystem, your own S3-compatible bucket (AWS, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze, MinIO, Wasabi), or OpenPlaud-hosted storage if you don't want to think about it. Your recordings, on infrastructure you control.
Exports to anything, anywhere
One click to Markdown, JSON, SRT, or VTT — ready for Notion, Obsidian, a video editor, or your own pipeline. Full backups are a single endpoint away. No lock-in, by design.
Real Plaud users, unedited
We didn't make this up. It's why we built OpenPlaud.
“The hardware is great, but the service is shit.”
— r/PlaudNoteUsers“Sent it back after learning about a $30/month subscription. Immediately reminded me of a Black Mirror episode.”
— r/PlaudNoteUsers“It's really hard to justify paying that much just for convenience.”
— r/PlaudNoteUsers“I'm in the process of making a workaround to bypass their subscription.”
— r/PlaudNoteUsers
For professionals
If your conversations stay in the room, your recordings should too.
Lawyers, journalists, consultants, researchers — OpenPlaud gives you the parts that matter: your recordings on infrastructure you control, the ability to audit every line of code yourself, and a real choice of AI provider, including ones that never leave your machine.
Infrastructure you control
Local disk, your own S3 bucket, or our hosted tier. No data sits somewhere you can't reach.
Auditable by design
Every line of OpenPlaud is AGPL-3.0. Read it, fork it, prove to your clients what it does.
Your choice of AI provider
OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, or a Whisper/Llama model running entirely on your own hardware via Ollama.
About HIPAA and regulated work
Plaud self-attests HIPAA compliance and will sign a BAA. OpenPlaud doesn't make a compliance claim of its own — the claim belongs to your AI provider, not to us. If you handle protected information (health, privileged legal, regulated financial), the right path is to self-host OpenPlaud with a provider that signs a BAA you've reviewed (OpenAI Enterprise, Azure Speech, Deepgram) — or use a local Whisper model that never leaves your machine. We won't promise compliance we don't control. We'll give you the tools to achieve it yourself.
Pick the version that fits you.
All three give you the same product. The only difference is who runs the server and how much you care about thinking about it.
Your machine. Your rules.
- Unlimited recordings
- Unlimited storage on your disk or your S3
- Bring your own AI keys
- Every feature, no gates
- AGPL-3.0 source
Try it in a minute, no card.
- 500 minutes of transcription / month
- 10 GB storage
- Bring your own AI keys
- Sync from one Plaud device
- Upgrade any time
Everything, unlimited.
- Unlimited transcription minutes
- Unlimited storage
- Bring your own AI keys
- Unlimited devices
- Priority sync, backups, support
For comparison: Plaud Pro is $17.99/month for 1,200 minutes. Plaud Unlimited is $29.99/month. OpenPlaud Hosted Pro gives you the same unlimited ceiling for $5, and you pay AI providers directly instead of paying us to mark them up.
Three commands. One container. Yours forever.
OpenPlaud ships as a single Docker Compose stack with PostgreSQL and automatic migrations. Point it at a domain, give it an AI key, and you're done. No telemetry, no phone home, no license server.
➜ Container openplaud-db-1 Started
➜ App running at http://localhost:3000
Questions people actually ask.
- Is this legal? Does using OpenPlaud void my Plaud warranty?
- OpenPlaud logs into your Plaud account with your credentials and downloads recordings through Plaud's existing API — the same way their own web app does. The hardware isn't modified. The official Plaud app keeps working alongside OpenPlaud. No warranty implications.
- What happens if Plaud changes their API?
- Worst case, sync breaks until we update. OpenPlaud is open-source and actively maintained — historically this has been a matter of hours to days. Your existing recordings stay yours regardless: they live on storage you control (or ours, on hosted) and never depend on Plaud's servers once synced.
- Which AI providers can I plug in?
- OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, and anything that speaks an OpenAI-compatible API — OpenRouter, Together, Fireworks, LM Studio, Ollama, vLLM. You can also run Whisper or a local Llama model entirely on your own machine. Adding a new provider takes one config entry.
- Can I move from hosted to self-host later (or the other way)?
- Yes, in one click. The full-backup endpoint gives you a single archive with every recording, transcript, and summary. Restore it into a self-hosted instance, or back into our hosted version, with no loss. We designed this to be easy to leave precisely so you don't have to worry about choosing it.
- Where is my data stored on the hosted version?
- On encrypted, S3-compatible storage we run. You can export everything at any time. If you need a specific jurisdiction or your own bucket, self-hosting points the same code at infrastructure you control.
- What about HIPAA, privileged legal work, or regulated financial data?
- We don't self-attest HIPAA compliance. The meaningful privacy claim belongs to your AI provider, not to us. For regulated work, the right path is self-hosting OpenPlaud and plugging in a provider that signs a BAA you've reviewed (OpenAI Enterprise, Azure Speech, Deepgram), or using a local Whisper model that never leaves your machine. We'll give you the knobs; you own the compliance story.
Stop renting your own voice.
Your Plaud Note already works. OpenPlaud gives you the rest of it — transcription, search, export, and a choice about where it all lives.