The keyboard was the bottleneck.

I started Harker with a simple frustration: typing was the slowest thing I did all day.

You can speak at over 150 words a minute. Most people type at 40 to 90. Every email, every Slack reply, every prompt I fed into an AI tool was getting squeezed through my keyboard, and my keyboard was the bottleneck. I could talk through an idea in seconds. Typing it out took minutes. That gap bothered me enough to do something about it.

The tools that existed asked for a trade I wasn't willing to make. The polished dictation apps stream your raw audio to someone else's servers, and charge $15 a month for the privilege. Apple's built-in dictation stays on your Mac, but it hands you a literal transcript: filler words, false starts, run-on sentences. I wanted both halves. Speech recognition that never leaves the device, and text clean enough to actually send.

So I built Harker to transcribe locally. It runs a Whisper model directly on your Mac. You press a shortcut, you talk, and the text lands in whatever app you're in: your email, your editor, your terminal. The audio is processed on-device, and your voice never leaves your machine. If you turn on the Premium AI features, only the finished text goes to the cloud for cleanup. Never the audio, and nothing is stored or used for training. That architecture isn't a tagline. It's the reason Harker exists.

The first version launched in June 2025 as a one-time purchase. Hundreds of people bought it, used it daily, and not one asked for a refund. What they asked for instead was more: smarter formatting, writing styles, grammar cleanup. That told me the transcription itself had become the easy part, and the intelligence on top was what people valued.

It also told me something about pricing. Local transcription shouldn't be metered. It runs on your hardware, costs nothing per word, and works offline. So in 2026 we made it free: unlimited dictation, every model size, no account, no word caps, no trial clock. The Premium tier covers the AI features that genuinely cost money to run, at $5.75 a month on the annual plan, less than half of what the cloud-first alternatives charge.

Harker answers to the people who use it, not to investors, and I like what that makes possible. Every decision gets measured against two questions: does it respect your time, and does it respect your privacy. If that sounds like software you'd want on your Mac, it's free to find out.