Why there is no account

What an account is usually for

Three things, in most apps. Identifying a paying customer, so the app knows whether to run. Syncing data between devices, so your history follows you. And knowing who the users are, which is the polite name for marketing. Dictera needs the first, refuses the third, and does without the second on purpose.

What replaces it

A license key. You buy at Lemon Squeezy, who handle the card; we never see the full card details. The key arrives by email, you paste it into Settings, and that is the whole ceremony.

Activating it sends three things to our licensing service: a SHA-256 hash of a hardware identifier, the key itself, and an activation name that defaults to your Mac's name. That last one is worth knowing, because Mac names often contain a person's name. It is there so you can tell your Macs apart, since one license covers 3 of them. The license is checked again roughly once a day, with some randomness in the timing, and it keeps working with no network at all for 14 days.

Your subscription is managed on Lemon Squeezy's page for your order, not in a Dictera account, because there is not one to put it in.

The trial has no signup either

The 14-day trial starts when you first open the app. No email, no card, no "create an account to continue". The app writes the moment of first launch down, in three places so that a reinstall does not reset it, and the licensing service keeps its own verdict against the same hardware hash, so going offline after the trial ends does not restart it either. Every feature is unlocked during the trial, including the assistant.

What you give up

• No sync. Your history, custom replacements and settings live on each Mac and nowhere else. If you work on two, each has its own. There is no cloud copy to restore from, so if your history matters, it is a folder in Application Support that Time Machine already backs up.
• No web dashboard. Word counts and session statistics are computed on your Mac and shown in the app. Nobody, including us, has a graph of your usage.
• No password reset, because there is no password. If you lose the key, it is on your Lemon Squeezy order page.

What you get

• Very little to breach. The licensing service holds what a sale needs: the email the receipt went to, the key, and the hashed identifiers and names of the Macs it is activated on. That is the whole of what a breach could expose, and none of it is anything you said or anyone said to you.
• Nothing to opt out of. No newsletter checkbox, no "help improve the product" telemetry, no analytics SDK in the binary. The app cannot report your usage, because there is no account to report it against.
• A short list of hosts, which you can check yourself. On default settings the app contacts the licensing service, the update feed on this site, and Hugging Face while a model downloads. The security page has the full table and the one-line Terminal command that shows every connection.
• An app that works with the network off. Once the models are downloaded, dictation, cleanup, translation, correction and on-device meeting notes all run with the Wi-Fi off, and the license carries on for 14 days.

Why we chose this

Dictera exists so that the things you say, and the things people say to you in meetings, stay on your Mac. An account would create the one server-side record that could contradict that, and every feature built on top of it, sync, sharing, a web view of your notes, would pull more of your data towards us. Each of those features is useful. Each is also a reason people cannot use a tool like this at work. We would rather ship the version that can go anywhere.

The honest cost is convenience: two Macs mean two histories, and a lost key means a trip to your order page rather than a reset email. We think that is the right trade for a speech tool. If you disagree, everything above is verifiable in about a minute, so at least you know exactly what you are trading. The privacy policy says the same thing at greater length, and the pricing page has the two plans.