Superwhisper: Price, Models and Privacy

Superwhisper is a dictation app. You press a shortcut, talk, and the text lands at your cursor in whatever Mac app you are using ¹. What sets it apart is choice: you pick the speech model, and it can run on your device ( on-device speech recognition) or in the cloud ( cloud dictation). The Free plan is unlimited with local Whisper models ². Pro costs $8.49 a month ³, $84.99 a year ⁴ or $249.99 once for a lifetime license ⁵.

The key fact for privacy is the default. Superwhisper starts on its cloud models, because they need no download ⁶. Your audio stays on your machine only after you switch to a local model. This guide explains the modes and models in plain words, what each plan costs, where your audio and text go, which model to pick, and how Superwhisper compares with Wispr Flow, MacWhisper, VoiceInk and the free dictation built into your computer. For the wider field, see our overview of dictation software and the comparison of AI dictation apps.

Superwhisper turns speech into text with local or cloud models

Superwhisper runs two models in a row. A speech recognition model turns your voice into text. Then, in a mode such as Super, an optional language model rewrites that text ¹⁶. That split explains almost everything about the app: its price tiers, its privacy, and its speed.

Modes decide what happens to your words

A mode pairs one speech model with an optional language model. The built-in modes are Voice, Super, Message, Email, Note and Meeting, and you can write custom modes with your own prompts ¹⁷.

Voice mode is transcription only, so results arrive quickly ¹⁹. The AI modes do more, and they read more. Context awareness processes your dictation with information from your screen ²⁰. When application context is on, the app also sends the date and time, your full name and your computer name ²¹. You can open any dictation in History to review everything that was sent to the AI ²². If you want the difference explained, our guide to AI dictation cleanup covers what a language model changes in a transcript, and dictation without AI covers apps that skip that step.

It runs on four platforms, unevenly

Superwhisper began on the Mac and spread to other platforms. The Mac app needs macOS 14 or later and runs on Apple Silicon and Intel ⁷. The Windows app runs on Windows 10 and 11, on x64 and ARM64, under the same license ⁸. The same Pro license also covers an iPhone and an Android phone ²³. On Android it transcribes in the cloud only, with no on-device models yet ²⁴. There is no Linux app ⁹.

The platforms are not equal. Meeting transcription is Mac only ²⁵. The Windows app was at version 1.6.6, and the maker says plainly that it does not publish a crash rate ²⁶. The question on Superwhisper for Windows and Android goes through each platform in detail.

The app has changed fast since 2023

Because the app moves this fast, older reviews often describe models and prices that no longer exist. Check the date on anything you read, including this page.

The free tier is unlimited; Pro and the lifetime license add cloud and AI

Superwhisper's free tier is genuinely useful if local Whisper models are enough for you. The Free plan gives unlimited dictation with any local Whisper model, up to two modes, custom vocabulary and text replacements ². Every Whisper model is free, from Tiny to Large v3 Turbo ³². New users also get their first 3,000 words with every Pro feature, after which the app drops back to Free without deleting anything ¹¹.

Pro adds the things that cost the maker money or that it treats as premium: cloud models, the Parakeet and Cohere Transcribe local models, AI modes, file transcription, translation to English and your own API keys ¹². Parakeet runs on your Mac just like Whisper, so the paywall is about the model, not about where it runs. The question Is Superwhisper free? answers the common follow-ups.

Three ways to pay for the same features

Every Pro plan includes the same features, and one license covers unlimited Macs and Windows PCs plus your iPhone and Android phone ²³. VoiceInk, by contrast, prices its one-time licenses by the number of Macs ^{36 37}.

Four details change what you actually pay:

• Where you buy. The prices above are for superwhisper.com. App Store and Google Play prices are higher ¹⁰.
• Discounts. Verified students, faculty and academic institutions get 40 percent off list price, requested by email before purchase ³⁸. That brings the lifetime license to about $149.99 ³⁹.
• Refunds. Superwhisper offers refunds for 30 days from the first purchase, on the monthly, yearly and lifetime plans ⁴⁰.
• The break-even. The lifetime license pays for itself after about two and a half years of monthly billing ³⁵. If you are not sure you will still dictate in 2029, the annual plan is the lower-risk choice.

Who should pay at all? If you dictate in English on an Apple Silicon Mac and want raw text, the free Whisper models cover you. Pay for Pro if you want AI rewriting, the faster Parakeet model, file transcription, meetings, or cloud models for a slow computer. The guide to free dictation software lists the free alternatives, and what AI dictation costs puts these prices next to the rest of the market.

Local models keep audio on your device; cloud modes do not

Where your voice goes depends on two choices: the speech model and the mode. With a local model, transcription runs on the device and audio never leaves it ⁴¹, and the app works without Wi-Fi ⁴². With a cloud model, audio goes to the Superwhisper proxy, is transcribed and comes back ⁴³. And because the app starts on cloud models ⁶, a new user who never opens the model settings is dictating to the cloud.

The third row is the one people miss. Superwhisper itself describes an on-device Parakeet speech model followed by a cloud Claude Sonnet language model as a common setup ⁴⁴. Your audio stays home, but your words, and whatever the mode reads from your screen, do not.

What the cloud side promises

Superwhisper says audio and transcripts processed by its cloud models are not stored on its servers once the request completes ⁴⁵. The exceptions are problem reports and meeting summaries you choose to send or share. A problem report, which includes the recording and transcript, is kept for 90 days ⁴⁶. Its terms say it does not use your data to train AI models ⁴⁷.

Third-party models are a separate question. Superwhisper's privacy policy says providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, xAI, Deepgram and ElevenLabs receive your request and process it under their own terms ⁴⁸. When a cloud model is used, your custom vocabulary words travel with the audio as spelling hints ⁴⁹, which matters if that list holds client or patient names. If you bring your own API keys, the app acts as a client of your account, and your agreement with the provider governs the data ⁵⁰. Those keys are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM on Mac and Windows ⁵¹. Our glossary explains bring your own key and zero data retention.

What stays on your own disk

Local does not mean nothing is stored. Superwhisper saves every recording on your device and keeps it forever by default. The Keep recordings for setting can delete them after a day up to a year, but saving cannot be turned off completely ⁵². On a shared computer, that archive is the bigger privacy risk.

Compliance for teams

Superwhisper says its SOC 2 Type II report is available under NDA and that it offers a DPA and a business associate agreement ⁵³. For local-only use, no audio or transcripts leave the device and no BAA is needed ⁵⁴. For cloud models, a customer must sign Superwhisper's own BAA ⁵⁵. Read what a business associate agreement covers and our guide to HIPAA-compliant dictation before dictating health information.

How to keep Superwhisper fully local (Superwhisper 3.0 on macOS, October 2026)

1. In your mode's settings, choose a local voice model: a Whisper model on Free, or Parakeet or Cohere Transcribe on Pro.
2. Use Voice mode, or a custom mode with no language model, so no text is sent for rewriting.
3. In the settings, set Keep recordings for to the shortest period you can live with.
4. Open a recent dictation in History and review what was sent to the AI ²². A fully local mode should show nothing sent.

The question Does Superwhisper work offline? covers each platform, and our guides to whether voice to text is safe and voice data retention compare these policies with other apps.

Which model to pick for speed and accuracy

For English dictation on an Apple Silicon Mac, Parakeet (Pro) and Whisper Large v3 Turbo (free) are both accurate enough that you will rarely notice the difference in a quiet room. Parakeet is faster and held up far better in our background-noise test. Whisper Turbo is free and covers more languages. Use a cloud model when your hardware is slow, when you need a language the local models do not handle well, or when you want Superwhisper's own S1-Voice.

The models in the app

If you see older names in reviews: Superwhisper Ultra is now called Whisper Large, Ultra V3 Turbo is Whisper Large v3 Turbo, and Standard, Nano and Fast were the small Whisper models ⁶⁰. So "Ultra vs Parakeet" is really Whisper vs Parakeet. Superwhisper's own short list is S1-Voice for cloud and Cohere Transcribe or Parakeet Multilanguage for local ⁶¹. All three need Pro.

Our measurements of the Whisper and Parakeet models

We test on-device speech models on a Mac ourselves and publish every transcript. We make Yap, which uses Parakeet, so read these numbers knowing that, and check the raw data if it matters to you. The results are measured as word error rate: the share of words the model got wrong.

On 100 English recordings from the FLEURS test set, Whisper large-v3-turbo had a word error rate of 3.92 percent ⁶² and Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 4.48 percent ⁶³. Parakeet was quicker, about 19 times faster than real time (its real-time factor) ⁶⁴ against about 12 times for Whisper ⁶⁵. Across 25 European languages on FLEURS, the medians were close: 10.11 percent for Parakeet ⁶⁶ and 11.34 percent for Whisper ⁶⁷.

Noise separates them. With background talk 5 dB quieter than the speaker, about a loud cafe, Whisper's error rate rose to 13.92 percent ⁶⁸ while Parakeet's reached 7.85 percent ⁶⁹. At 10 dB, a busy office, Whisper was at 5.51 percent ⁷⁰ and Parakeet at 4.48 percent ⁷¹. In a quiet room they scored 3.78 percent ⁷² and 4.44 percent ⁷³, so Parakeet barely moved while Whisper rose.

Long dictation is close too. On English readings of 3 to 4 minutes handed over as one recording, Whisper had 2.91 percent ⁷⁴ and Parakeet 2.70 percent ⁷⁵. The bigger difference is dropped passages: Whisper left out 10 or more words in a row in 4 of 84 readings ⁷⁶, Parakeet in 1 of 84 ⁷⁷.

Three caveats apply. Superwhisper runs Whisper through whisper.cpp ⁷⁸, as our test did, so those results should carry over closely. It runs Parakeet through Argmax's WhisperKit on macOS ⁷⁹, a different runtime from ours, so expect some difference. And the maker itself warns that Parakeet can struggle with punctuation and occasionally invents text on one-word recordings ⁵⁹. Our test sentences were read, not dictated. The guides to speech recognition benchmarks and dictation in background noise explain why the conditions matter.

What Superwhisper's own benchmark says

Superwhisper runs its own leaderboard of 16 models over 8 datasets, including meetings and earnings calls ⁸⁰. It reports 6.6 percent for S1-Voice ⁸¹ and 8.4 percent for Cohere Transcribe on an Apple M4 ⁵⁷. Those datasets differ from ours, so the numbers cannot be compared with the chart above, and we have not confirmed them.

Hardware limits your choice

On Intel Macs, Parakeet and Cohere are not available and the maker recommends cloud models ⁸². On Windows ARM laptops, Cohere and Whisper Large v3 Turbo are not supported yet, which leaves Parakeet Multilanguage as the local option ⁸³.

The question Which Superwhisper model is best? goes model by model, and our explainer on Whisper covers the model family itself.

How it compares with Wispr Flow, MacWhisper and VoiceInk

Superwhisper sits in the middle of its rivals. It has more platforms and more model choice than MacWhisper or VoiceInk, a local option that Wispr Flow lacks, and a lower yearly price than Wispr Flow. It costs more up front than MacWhisper or VoiceInk.

Billed yearly, Superwhisper Pro costs about $59 less a year than one Wispr Flow Pro seat ⁹⁸. Its lifetime license costs about 5.1 times VoiceInk's largest one-time plan ⁹⁹, but covers Windows and phones too.

• Wispr Flow is cloud-only and has far more iPhone ratings than Superwhisper. It averaged 4.85 stars from 18,110 US App Store ratings ^{100 101}, against Superwhisper's 4.38 from 846 ^{14 15}. Choose it if you want polish and do not need offline use. See our Wispr Flow guide and Wispr Flow vs Superwhisper.
• MacWhisper is built around files: you drag any file into it ¹⁰². It also offers dictation in any app ¹⁰³, and its privacy policy says no audio or text leaves the device ¹⁰⁴. Choose it if you transcribe recordings more than you dictate. See the MacWhisper guide and Superwhisper vs MacWhisper.
• VoiceInk is open source under GPL v3 ¹⁰⁵ and Mac only. Choose it if you want local dictation for the lowest one-time price. See the VoiceInk guide, VoiceInk vs Superwhisper and our list of open-source dictation software.

On Windows, if you want on-device dictation without a cloud default, Yap is another option: see our Windows page or download it. Our pages on MacWhisper for Windows and VoiceInk for Windows cover the Windows options for those two apps.

What users say

On Google Play the app showed 5,000 downloads or more ¹⁰⁶. Among developers it is well known: it appeared in 76 Hacker News stories and comments in 12 months ¹⁰⁷, and Andrej Karpathy named it as the tool he talks to Cursor's Composer with ¹⁰⁸.

Built-in dictation may be enough

Before paying, try what you already have. On a Mac, Apple says general text Dictation is processed on your device and not sent to Siri servers ¹⁰⁹, and it costs nothing. Superwhisper, an AI dictation app, earns its price with model choice, custom vocabulary, AI modes and one license across Mac and Windows. If you only dictate short messages, start with dictation on Mac or Windows voice typing, and read Superwhisper vs Apple Dictation for the trade-offs.

Superwhisper suits people who want model choice across devices

Superwhisper is a good fit if you dictate a lot, use both a Mac and a Windows PC, and want to decide for yourself between local privacy and cloud polish. It is a weaker fit if you want something that works perfectly out of the box with no settings, or if you rely on Android offline.

• Writers and developers on Apple Silicon Macs get the most: free local Whisper, fast Parakeet on Pro, and AI modes when wanted. See voice coding.
• Privacy-sensitive users can keep everything local, but must change the default model and the recording retention setting.
• Students pay 40 percent less with a verified discount ³⁸.
• Windows users get the same license, with fewer features than on the Mac ¹¹⁰.
• Android users get cloud dictation only.

For a ranked view across every need, see the best dictation software and the best dictation app for Mac.