Earkeep vs Plaud

Both are "always carried, no bot" tools by philosophy. One is a piece of hardware with a subscription; the other is software you own outright. The choice is mostly about where your conversations physically happen.

Earkeep never asks you to press anything. It continuously records mic and system audio while running, transcribes locally, and you define a meeting by selecting a span on the timeline after it happened, or let a connected calendar start and end the span automatically.

Plaud's devices are manual: you press a button to start and stop a recording. This is the single most-cited complaint in Plaud's own user community, missed and failed recordings from finicky touch controls, alongside a recurring feature request for pause and resume that the product doesn't have. One power user compared Plaud unfavorably to the always-on Limitless pendant on this exact point, before Limitless was acquired by Meta and shut down. Earkeep's retroactive-span model exists precisely to remove this failure mode: there's nothing to remember to press.

Earkeep's transcription runs entirely on your device, hardware-accelerated on Apple Silicon, and audio is processed only in memory and never written to disk. There is no upload, no API call for core functionality, no account.

Plaud's model is cloud-dependent by design: the device captures and stores audio, syncs it to Plaud's app over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and cloud AI running on Plaud's infrastructure does the transcription, speaker labeling, and summarization. Plaud compensates with compliance paperwork, ISO 27001/27701, SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA claims, but the audio still has to leave the device to become useful. Plaud's own community has raised this directly: users have returned devices specifically over privacy concerns, one Reddit thread is literally titled "Privacy-proof alternative?", and another flags that the app shipped without multi-factor authentication protecting a cloud full of private conversations for a period.

Earkeep's answer isn't a compliance badge, it's architecture: there's no cloud pipeline to trust, because there's no cloud pipeline at all. See private by design.

Plaud is a two-part purchase: hardware up front, then a subscription to actually use it for anything beyond the free tier.

• Hardware: $159 (Plaud Note or NotePin) to $189 (Note Pro) or $179 (NotePin S), one-time, per device.
• Subscription: the free tier caps at 300 transcription minutes a month, about 2.5 hours, which a working professional can burn through in a couple of days. Real use needs Pro at $99.99/yr for 1,200 minutes a month, or Unlimited at $239.99/yr.
• Year one, a serious user: roughly $260-430, device plus a paid annual plan. Every year after: $100-240, forever.
• Over two to three years, a single Plaud user is looking at roughly $460-890 (Note or NotePin) to $600-1,100+ (Note Pro), before counting a lost or broken device.

Earkeep is €39, once, for one device. No hardware to buy, charge, or replace, no subscription to renew or forget to cancel, no minutes to ration.

Plaud's compliance story is built on certifications and a stated policy that recordings aren't used for AI training. Those are real commitments, but they describe how Plaud's cloud handles your audio after it leaves your device, because leaving the device is a required step for every AI feature, transcription included.

Earkeep's privacy story is architectural, not contractual: audio from your device's mic and system output is transcribed locally, processed only in memory, and never written to disk, let alone uploaded. There's no server to trust, no account to create, and no API call for core functionality. Your transcripts are plain files you own outright, with no cloud library standing between you and them.

Be honest about this: if your conversations mostly happen away from a computer, Plaud does something Earkeep genuinely can't. In-person meetings on a factory floor, hospital rounds, courtroom proceedings, sales calls in the field, phone calls on the handset itself, lectures, or a wearable clipped on all day at a conference: a laptop isn't there, so Earkeep has nothing to listen to. Plaud built dedicated hardware exactly for this gap, and for people whose work is mostly off-computer, that hardware is the right tool even with the subscription attached.

Earkeep is built for the opposite case: a laptop-centered work week of online meetings and in-person meetings where the laptop is open on the table.