About Lip
Lip is a one-person, one-thing bet: that the best dictation app is the one that does nothing but dictation, without a rough edge, and never asks you for a monthly fee to keep doing it.
Last updated 2026-10-05.
The north star
“The fastest, most accurate, most trustworthy way to turn your voice into text on your own Mac. Nothing else.”
Every decision about what goes into Lip is tested against that sentence: does it make dictation faster, more accurate, or more trustworthy? If the answer is no to all three, it doesn't go in, no matter how easy it would be to add or how many other apps already have it.
Why one-time payment
Lip runs entirely on your Mac, so the marginal cost of any single dictation is zero: there's no server call to make and nothing to meter. A subscription only makes sense when a company has an ongoing cost to pass through, or the product keeps getting meaningfully better every month in a way that justifies paying again. Neither is true here.
Charging monthly for a static local binary would be rent-seeking, not cost recovery. So Lip is sold once. Against “$15 a month, forever,” “$39 once” isn't just cheaper for you over time, it's the honest price for what it actually costs to keep running: nothing.
Why on-device
Trust is the product here, not a feature of it. A dictation app sees everything you say out loud into your Mac: passwords read aloud by mistake, drafts you wouldn't send, things you're thinking through before you mean them. Lip never gets the chance to mishandle any of that, because it never receives it. Audio is captured, transcribed, and discarded on your machine, and there is no server on the other end for it to go to.
That claim is meant to be checked, not taken on faith. The Security page lists every connection Lip can make, walks through what's on disk, and gives you the command to run mid-dictation that shows there is nothing open at all.
What Lip will never be
Not an assistant. Not a subscription. Not a cloud service. Each of those is a different product with a different set of promises, and bolting them onto Lip would mean breaking the one promise that actually matters here.
A product that does one thing without a single rough edge beats a product that does seven things adequately. Flawless beats complete. That's a deliberate rejection of feature-parity with anything else on the market. Matching a longer feature list is not the goal, and never will be.
Will this still be maintained?
Yes, and here's exactly what that means, not just an assurance. every future version is included with no upgrade fee. Every fix and improvement that lands in the version you bought is included, for as long as that line is maintained, at no extra cost.
And if it weren't maintained: once a licence is activated, Lip never needs to contact a server again. If Lip's infrastructure disappeared tomorrow, every already-activated copy would keep dictating exactly as it does today. That's not a hope, it's a consequence of how the licence check works.