Five years of one tool
What does it
actually cost?
Twelve dollars a month doesn't feel like a decision. Sixty of them is seven hundred and twenty dollars, for a tool that turns speech into text. Here's the same five years, side by side.
Sixty months at $12. The counter on the right stops at 99 and never moves again.
What you're actually buying
| Wispr Flow | Lickety | |
|---|---|---|
| Year one | $144 | $99 |
| Year five | $720 | $99 |
| If they raise the price | You pay it or you stop using it | Doesn't apply |
| If the company folds | The tool stops working | It keeps working. It never needed them |
| If you stop paying | You lose the tool | There is nothing to stop paying |
| Your custom word list | Lives in their database | A file on your drive, with export |
Wispr Flow at $12 a month, billed annually — their cheaper rate, not their month-to-month one. Checked 6 October 2026. They are a good product and this page is not an attempt to make them look worse than they are; the argument only works if the numbers are theirs.
Why we can promise this and they can't
This isn't generosity, it's arithmetic. A cloud dictation tool pays for GPU time every time you speak, so it has a bill that arrives whether or not you buy again. It genuinely has to charge you monthly.
Lickety runs on hardware you already own and paid for. There is no recurring cost on our side, so there's no honest reason to invent one on yours. Buy-once is only a promise you can keep when there's no server to switch off. That's the same reason local matters — the two claims hold each other up.
Pay it in pieces
The same price, split two to four ways, with no premium for spreading it. If you change your mind partway, return the license and the payments stop. It terminates — that's what makes it not a subscription.
Buying for a team
Per-seat prices drop at 5, 15 and 50 seats, and there's a flat whole-office license if you'd rather stop counting installs. One purchase order, no annual renewal, nothing to re-justify next budget cycle.
Related
Where your text goes
Transcription runs on your own CPU. There is no server, so there is nothing to breach and nothing to go down.
Read →It learns your words
Seed your customers', vendors' and coworkers' names before it listens instead of repairing the output afterwards.
Read →The honest comparison
Where Lickety wins, where it loses, and the one test that tells you more than any review.
Read →Lickety — $79, once
Windows 10 & 11. No account, no upload, nothing renews.