Pricing
Pay once.
Bring your own key.
Heliotype has no server and no cost per hour of audio, so it does not charge rent. You pay $29 once; transcription bills to your own AssemblyAI account at their rate.
The arithmetic
What it costs you, in your hours.
Move the slider to your real meeting load. The subscription column is the mid-point of what the common per-seat tools charge one person on monthly billing — the annual-plan numbers are under the table, because leaving them out would flatter us.
Heliotype — year one
Per-seat subscription — year one
Heliotype — three years
Per-seat subscription — three years
Assumptions, so you can check them: Heliotype $29 once; AssemblyAI at $0.23 per audio-hour (their async rate of $0.21 plus the $0.02 speaker-diarization add-on, which Heliotype always requests; a cheaper model brings it to $0.17); a new AssemblyAI account starts with about $50 of free credit, which the first-year figure applies before charging you. Subscription column at $17/month, the mid-point of the common per-seat tools billed monthly — Otter Pro about $16.99, Fathom Premium about $20, Granola from about $14 per user.
The billing basis, stated plainly: those are monthly-billed rates, and monthly is the most expensive way to buy any of them. Where a tool sells an annual plan, paying yearly is cheaper — Otter works out around $8.33 a month and Fathom around $16 — so three years of one seat bought annually is nearer $300–$576 than the $612 in the table. Not every tool listed above offers annual billing at all, and we have no data on how many people choose it where it exists, so read those two figures as the ends of the range rather than as what you would pay. We show the monthly figure because it is the one you are quoted before you commit; the argument does not need the worst case, because the shape is what matters — a subscription keeps charging, and a one-time licence stops. Prices checked 29 July 2026; verify before relying on them.
One-time license · 14-day full trial · secure checkout by Stripe.
- One-time payment. $29 during launch, $39 list. No recurring charge, no per-minute meter, no seat count.
- Bring your own AssemblyAI key. Transcription bills to you, directly, at roughly $0.17–0.23 per hour of audio, diarization included.
- Free credit goes a long way. New AssemblyAI accounts start with about $50 in credit — more than 200 hours of meetings — before you pay them anything.
- Key on the spot. Your license key appears on the confirmation page after checkout — paste it into the app once and you're done.
- Nothing to Heliotype after purchase. No account, no server, no clawback. The key is verified offline on your Mac.
or download the free 14-day trial first — it's the complete app.
Apple Silicon · macOS 13+ to transcribe, macOS 15+ to record · 50 MB download
Why this isn't a subscription
A subscription is how you pay for something that costs the seller money every month. Bot-based note-takers genuinely have that cost — they run infrastructure and pay for inference on every meeting, so their pricing has to recur.
Heliotype has neither. There is no server, no account system, and no inference bill, because your own key pays for transcription at cost. Charging monthly for software that costs nothing to run would be rent, not a price. So it's one payment — and that is also why we can tell you the honest per-hour number instead of hiding it inside a plan.
The flip side, stated plainly: you pay AssemblyAI directly, so heavy use costs more than light use, and there's a signup step we can't remove yet. An on-device engine would end both — it's the top roadmap item, without a promised date.
If you're comparing against a specific tool rather than the category, the three closest are written up individually — including what each does better than we do: Granola, Otter, Fathom.
Refunds: if Heliotype doesn't do what this site says, email hello@heliotype.app within 14 days of purchase and we'll refund you. The trial exists so it rarely comes to that — and what it can't do is published, so there are fewer surprises to refund.