QuickSpeak vs. tl;dv: free transcripts, expiring library

tl;dv — "too long; didn't view" — built its name on the same pain everyone in this category targets: meetings produce hours nobody re-watches. Its answer is a clip-and-share machine: record the call, cut the highlight, ship the link to the team. The recording library is the product, which is exactly why its free tier's fine print matters — the transcripts are unlimited, but the library they live in is metered and expires. QuickSpeak is the opposite architecture: no cloud library at all, everything on your disk, nothing that expires. Here's the comparison, with tl;dv's numbers from their own pages.

The free plans promise different things

On paper, both free tiers transcribe without limits. Read the retention line and they diverge. tl;dv's free plan keeps your data for up to three months (per their own review materials), meters AI notes at roughly ten meetings and Ask AI at ten queries, and caps uploads at five. That's a real allowance — more generous than Otter's minute quota — but it's built on a clock: the transcript of January's kickoff quietly vanishes in April. For a team whose meetings are ephemeral, fine. For anyone building an archive — "what did we decide last quarter?" — the free plan is renting the answer.

QuickSpeak's free tier has no clock because there's no storage bill to amortize: the transcript and audio are files in your browser profile, and full history is included without a meter. The Pro tier ($12/month or $99/year, 14-day trial, no card) adds the layers worth paying for — live captions, cross-meeting search, persistent speaker profiles, on-device AI briefs — but the archive itself was never the upsell, so it never expires.

The bot, with credit for the consent feature

tl;dv's default capture is a bot that joins your Meet, Zoom, and Teams calls as a named participant, auto-joined through calendar sync — the same opt-out default as Fireflies, with the same "who's this participant?" moment with clients. Two things tl;dv does around it deserve honest credit: a bot-free desktop recorder for people who want capture without the participant, and a consent feature that blocks the recording if an external invitee declines — the only tool we've compared that wires consent into the mechanism itself rather than leaving it as a policy page. QuickSpeak's position is simpler: no bot, ever, and consent is your job, disclosed however you prefer.

Clip-and-share vs. keep-and-search

The products diverge at the output. tl;dv optimizes for distribution: cut the 40-second moment, send the link, let the team catch up in minutes — a workflow sales and customer-success teams genuinely live on, and one QuickSpeak has no answer to because sharing isn't in its architecture. Exports are files; distribution is yours.

QuickSpeak optimizes for custody: the full transcript and audio on your machine, searchable across every meeting (Pro), with speaker names that persist — and with AI briefs and transcript chat running on a local model, so asking "what did we decide?" doesn't route the answer through anyone's cloud. If your meetings end in files — a memo, client notes, a case record — the custody model fits. If your meetings end in Slack links, tl;dv's model fits, and the three-month clock is the price of admission worth reading twice.

What tl;dv does better

• Clips, highlights, and share links — the core workflow QuickSpeak doesn't attempt.
• Team library. A central searchable home for the whole team's meetings. Local architecture can't provide this; it's a genuine capability, not a missing checkbox.
• Consent gating. Blocking recording when an external invitee declines is a thoughtful mechanism we'd compliment even as competitors.
• Category track record. One of the category's best Product Hunt launches (632 upvotes on the original Meet release) and years of iteration since.