Every AI Meeting Tool Wants a Monthly Fee. So I Built My Own

#rust #ai

Somewhere along the way, productivity software stopped being something you buy and started being something you rent.

You want an AI note-taker for your meetings? That's $18/month. You want it to also generate action items? Upgrade to Pro. Need it to work across more than one device? That's another tier. Oh, and by the way — if you ever cancel your subscription, your notes are still "in our cloud," but good luck accessing them.

I got fed up with it.

Not just mildly annoyed — genuinely, properly fed up. I work in enough back-to-back meetings that an AI meeting assistant would be legitimately useful to me. But I wasn't willing to hand over a recurring fee for something my laptop is already capable of doing by itself.

So I built Oats AI — a free, local, open-source AI meeting assistant. No subscription. No cloud. No paywalls.

Oats AI in action: live transcription and AI-generated action items, running entirely on your machine.

What Oats AI Actually Does

It sits quietly in the corner of your screen while your meeting runs.

It captures your system audio — no virtual cable driver, no admin rights required — and transcribes everything in real time. Under the hood, it taps directly into native OS audio APIs (WASAPI Loopback on Windows, ScreenCaptureKit on macOS), so there's nothing extra to install and no elevated permissions needed. The entire app ships as a single binary built with Rust and Tauri, which means it's fast, small, and doesn't quietly eat your RAM in the background.

You also get a side panel where you can jot down your own notes manually, the old-fashioned way, alongside the live transcript.

When the meeting's over, you hit summarize. Oats AI processes the transcript and pulls out the key points and action items — the stuff you actually need to remember. Clean, readable, ready to copy into your Notion or email thread.

That's it. No setup wizard. No onboarding flow. No "invite your team to unlock this feature."

The Part That Actually Matters: It's All Local

Here's what separates Oats AI from everything else in this space.

Most AI meeting tools work by recording your meeting audio and sending it to their servers for processing. That's how they can offer such a polished experience. It's also how they justify the monthly fee, because their infrastructure isn't free.

Oats AI doesn't do any of that.

The transcription runs on-device using whisper.cpp — an optimized port of OpenAI's Whisper model that runs efficiently on your CPU or GPU without needing an internet connection. Your meeting notes and transcripts are stored in a local SQLite database, relative to the app folder. No account to create, no "sync with cloud" toggle to worry about, and no vendor who could theoretically read your meeting recordings if they wanted to.

For anyone working in a corporate environment where sensitive conversations happen daily, this matters a lot more than most tools acknowledge.

Free. And Not "Free with Asterisk" Free.

Let's be specific about what free means here, because the word has been corrupted beyond recognition by modern SaaS.

No trial period that expires in 14 days
No feature limits in a "free tier"
No "free for personal use, paid for teams"
No credit card required. Ever.

The app is fully open-source. For the AI summarization feature, Oats AI uses OpenRouter — a platform that provides access to genuinely free AI models, including models like mistralai/mistral-7b-instruct and google/gemma-3-4b-it, among others. You register your own account (via Google or GitHub), generate a free API key, and paste it in once. No billing info, no balance to top up, no usage fees. We don't even see your key.

And if the OpenRouter free tier ever gets slow or overloaded mid-meeting? Oats AI automatically falls back to a built-in local summarizer that works without any internet connection. Your notes are never held hostage by an external service.

One binary. Your machine. No recurring charges.

Built for the Zen-Minimalist Workflow

The design is intentionally simple — what we internally call a "Zen-Minimalist" approach. There are two panels: your manual notes on the left, the live transcript on the right. A small pulsing indicator called the "Grain Pulse" lets you know the app is actively listening.

There are no dashboards, no analytics, no "insights about your meeting habits." Just the tools you need to capture what happened and move on with your day.

The name comes from the idea of information nutrition. Oats aren't flashy, but they're exactly what you need. That's the experience we were aiming for.

If You Know WicaraAI, Think of This as the Next Chapter

Some of you might be familiar with WicaraAI, a desktop transcription tool we released earlier — also free, also local, also open-source.

WicaraAI does one thing really well: it takes an audio or video file, runs it through Whisper, and gives you a clean, formatted transcript. That's it. It's a sharp, focused tool and it still works great for that specific use case.

But a transcript is only half the story.

After a two-hour meeting, you don't want to read two hours worth of text. You want to know: what did we actually decide? Who is doing what by when? That's the gap Oats AI was built to fill.

Oats AI moves beyond transcription into understanding. It listens to your meeting live, captures the transcript in real time, and when you're done — it reads that transcript and pulls out the action items that actually matter. It's WicaraAI's core capability, taken further.

Same philosophy. Same commitment to local-first and free. Just more useful for the meeting context specifically.