Wispr Flow Just Raised $81M. Resonant Is Still Free.
Last November, Wispr Flow closed a $25 million extension round led by Notable Capital, bringing its total funding to $81 million. The company has grown 40% month-over-month and is now valued at $700 million. By any measure, it's one of the most well-funded voice dictation products ever built.
Resonant has raised exactly $0. And it's completely free.
Those two facts are related.
What $81 million buys
Wispr Flow's cloud infrastructure is the product. Every word you dictate travels from your mic, through your internet connection, to Wispr's servers, through their AI pipeline, and back to your screen as text. That round-trip happens fast — usually under a second — and the accuracy is genuinely good.
But running that infrastructure at scale costs money. Maintaining it for hundreds of thousands of users, across Mac, Windows, and iOS, with enterprise-grade uptime, costs a lot of money. That's why Wispr charges $15 a month, or $144 a year. And why the free tier caps you at 2,000 words per week — roughly 15 minutes of speaking.
The VC capital covers growth and expansion. The subscriptions cover operations. And your voice data is, at minimum, passing through infrastructure that someone else controls and is financially motivated to keep running.
What local processing costs
Resonant uses the Neural Engine inside your Apple Silicon Mac to run speech recognition entirely on-device. No audio leaves your machine. No servers are involved. The transcription happens in milliseconds, right where you are, using hardware you already paid for.
Because Resonant doesn't run cloud infrastructure, it doesn't have infrastructure costs to recover from users. There's no metering, no tiered plan, no usage cap. You dictate as much as you want, whenever you want, for free — including on a plane, in a basement, or anywhere else without internet.
Privacy isn't a toggle
Wispr Flow introduced a Privacy Mode after public criticism in 2025. It deletes audio immediately after processing rather than retaining it for 30 days. It's a meaningful improvement, and Wispr deserves credit for responding to user concerns.
But Privacy Mode doesn't change the underlying architecture. Your audio still leaves your device. Processing still happens on Wispr's servers. You're trusting their implementation of that deletion, their security posture, and their continued commitment to that policy as the company grows and investor expectations shift.
Resonant doesn't have a privacy policy for dictation content because there's nothing to write a policy about. Your audio never leaves your Mac. There are no servers to breach, no policies to update, and no future fundraising rounds that might change the incentives around how your data is handled.
When cloud dictation makes sense
Wispr Flow has real advantages. It works on Windows and iOS. Its filler word removal is excellent. Context awareness across apps is a genuinely useful feature. If you work across multiple platforms or need the Windows experience, Resonant can't replace it today.
But if you're on a Mac — especially an Apple Silicon Mac — you're paying $15 a month to send your voice to a cloud that exists primarily because local processing used to be too slow. That gap closed when Apple shipped the Neural Engine. The hardware caught up. The cloud pricing didn't.
Try Resonant for free
Resonant is a free download for Mac. No account required. No subscription. No words-per-week cap. It works offline and keeps your voice on your device because there's nowhere else for it to go.
Wispr Flow is building something impressive with that $81 million. But your voice doesn't need to fund it.
Download Resonant and see how local dictation feels.