The free plan was a promise.
Today I am taking it back.

Why

Three reasons, in the order they actually mattered.

A price paid once cannot pay a bill that arrives every month.

Under the old version, the replies you generated were billed to you by someone else, and my running cost was zero. That is the only reason a single up-front price was ever an honest number — I was selling you future work, not a service I was paying to keep alive.

Now I supply the model and I pay for every reply. Somebody working through two rounds of interviews costs me real money every month they keep going, and there is no version of a single payment that survives that. I could have kept selling it and quietly hoped people stopped using the product. That is a worse thing to do than publishing this page.

Sign-in comes first, and that is deliberate.

Before a single word can be transcribed, macOS has to ask you for Screen Recording, and that is a frightening system dialog. An email address is the cheap ask, so it goes first: open, sign in, grant the two permissions, press Start. Every screen the app shows follows that order.

It is also the only way one free trial can be counted. Without an account, “once” means nothing, and a trial that cannot be counted ends up as a paywall in front of the first reply instead.

Holding something means saying what I hold.

There is now an email address, a plan, a payment reference, a count of replies in the current period, a list of your signed-in devices, and the UTC offset that sets your midnight. That is the complete list, it is published in the terms, and it will stay published. The count is one number per period — there is no per-request log, so I cannot reconstruct what you were asked or what you were told, and I would rather not be able to.

The app says the rest in one line: “When a reply is generated, the question, the last three turns and your About-you note pass through our server for the seconds it takes. None of it is written to disk.” The turns go so the reply fits what was just said; the rest of the transcript never leaves this Mac. The question, those turns and your note go on to one model provider, which is named — with what it gets and what it keeps — on the sub-processor page. I will not name it anywhere else, because it is my cost and my choice and it changes without notice. That page names it because the law gives you the right to know.

The free plan, and what replaces it

The only part of this change that costs you something rather than me.

The old pricing page called the free plan permanent, and called it the whole product rather than a taste of it. That was a promise. It was unqualified, I wrote it, and people read it and believed it.

What replaces it is one trial — thirty minutes from the first Start, or fifty generated replies — once per account. That is not a smaller version of the same thing. It is a different thing, and it is strictly less. I am not going to argue that the words meant something narrower than they said, and I am not going to let them disappear quietly in a redesign and hope nobody kept a screenshot.

I made a promise about a business I no longer have. I am retiring it now, before the subscription takes its first payment, rather than finding out a month in that I could not keep it. That is the best timing available to me; it is not an excuse. If you planned around that promise, I am sorry.

What did not change, and will not

These five are the reason Converside exists. A subscription is what pays for keeping them, which is most of the argument for charging one.

• Nothing starts until you press Start. It is a button you press at the moment it matters, not a checkbox in an onboarding flow you click past.
• The microphone is never requested. The permission is not declared in the app, so macOS cannot prompt for it. Check it in System Settings; do not take my word for it.
• No audio is ever written to disk. No code path does it, and a test in the build enforces that it stays true.
• Transcription runs on your machine. Your own voice never leaves it, subscription or not.
• No stealth, at any price, ever. No hidden window, no screen-share evasion, no camouflaged process. Other products charge a great deal of money for exactly those. Having a subscription does not make me reconsider; it is what lets me not.

That is the whole change. If you think I got it wrong, the address at the bottom of this page is read by me.

— Chien, who makes Converside  ·  1 October 2026

About this note

This page stays up. It will not come down when it stops being convenient, and it will not be edited after today except to correct a factual error or to fill the one sentence above that is still being decided. Any change is dated below this line and the original sentence stays visible above it.

Corrections to date: none.