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AI providers & costs

Daisy never bundles an AI service you can't see. Every meeting goes through two steps — transcription and summarization — handled very differently.

Transcription runs on your machine

Your finished transcript is always produced locally, and Daisy figures out who said what on-device — for free, in every configuration. Your saved audio never leaves the laptop to be turned into the transcript you keep.

The one part that can touch the cloud is the live caption while you record, and only on lighter laptops:

  • Desktops and Apple Silicon Macs — live captions on-device.

  • Lighter laptops — on-device, or a bring-your-own Deepgram realtime key for a lighter footprint, or skip live and take the full transcript at the end.

  • Cost: the finished transcript and speaker labels are $0. A Deepgram live-caption key, if you opt into one, is billed to your own Deepgram account.

  • After a 1-hour meeting: Daisy needs a few minutes to finish the transcript, label the speakers, write the summary, and lay out the chapter table.

See Transcription speed and cost for the full numbers and Live and real-time transcription for the live-caption options.

Summarization

Summaries always need an AI service — there's no good fully-offline option for this part yet. You choose how the AI step runs: a local model, your own provider key, or Daisy Cloud.

  • Your own key (recommended) — Anthropic, OpenAI, or Groq with your own API key. Best quality; roughly 5¢–50¢ per meeting depending on model and meeting length.
  • Local AI (advanced) — an OpenAI-compatible endpoint from LM Studio or Ollama, reachable from this machine. Free, but only as good as the model you run. Setup details in Running Daisy fully offline.
  • Daisy Cloud — don't want to manage a key? Daisy Cloud can run the AI step for you, with the provider keys managed on Daisy's side. Recording and transcription stay on your machine; only text is sent. See What is Daisy Cloud?.
  • Skip — keep transcripts only and use your own ChatGPT or Claude via copy-paste. The transcript view has a Copy all button; paste it into your own chat, ask for a summary, paste the summary back into Daisy. Free, no setup, no key.

Where your key lives

Any API key you add lives in Daisy's vault on your machine. If you secured the vault with a passphrase, only that passphrase decrypts the key — and it never leaves the laptop. On a trusted-this-machine vault, Daisy unlocks it automatically. Charges go straight to the provider on your account — you can watch usage and revoke the key from their console anytime.

What happens to your data if your license lapses

If your subscription ends, Daisy stops recording new meetings until you renew. But your existing recordings, transcripts, summaries, and notes stay exactly where they are — in the profile folder you chose. Your data is yours to keep, move, or back up regardless of subscription status.