Privacy

JotMic is a dictation app for macOS, operated by Surya Kiran, a sole proprietor based in India. This policy describes exactly what the app sends, what our servers hold, and for how long. It is written from the source code rather than from a template, so where it is specific it is specific on purpose.

The short version

• JotMic can never see your screen. It ships no screen-recording and no camera entitlement, so this is a thing it cannot do, not merely a thing it does not do.
• We never store your audio and we never store your transcripts. Neither on our servers nor at our speech provider.
• A history of what you dictated is kept only on your Mac, in a local database you can switch off or clear.
• The app counts how it is used, and never what you said. It reports that it launched, which permissions it holds, whether you finished setup, and one line per dictation carrying the engine, the word count and the length in milliseconds. No transcript, no audio, no record of which app you were typing into. There is no switch to turn it off. It is set out in full below.
• We never see your card. Our payment provider is the merchant of record and card details never reach us.
• One switch stops all of it. Turn on On-device only in Settings and nothing you say, type, copy or select is uploaded — see below for what that does and does not cover.

What we collect, and why

Your account

Signing in stores your email address. There is no password — you sign in with a one-time code sent to that address. Against your account we hold your plan, your payment provider’s customer and subscription identifiers, your subscription status and its renewal date. We use these to decide what your app is entitled to and to contact you about your purchase. An account is required even before you pay, because the free allowance has to be counted against something.

What you say

JotMic has two transcription engines and which one runs decides whether your audio leaves your Mac.

• On-device. Speech is transcribed by a model running on your own machine. The audio does not reach us, does not reach our speech provider, and does not reach anyone else.
• Hosted. Each recording is sent to our transcription service, which forwards it to our speech-recognition provider and returns text. The audio is held only for the moment it takes to transcribe it. We do not store the audio, we do not store the transcript, and we do not log what you said. Our server logs record an account identifier and the length of the recording so that usage can be counted, and nothing about its content.

The microphone, and the 400 milliseconds before you speak

JotMic holds the microphone open for as long as it is running, rather than opening it the moment you press the key. Opening a capture device takes long enough that the first syllable of your sentence would be clipped, so the app keeps a rolling 400-millisecond buffer of sound in memory and prepends it to whatever you go on to dictate.

What that means in practice. macOS shows its microphone indicator while JotMic is running, and at any given moment the last 400 milliseconds of sound near your Mac exist in the app’s memory. That buffer is continuously overwritten, is never written to disk, and is never transmitted — unless you hold the dictation key, at which point the 400 milliseconds before the keypress are sent along with what follows, which is the entire reason it exists. Nothing is transcribed, stored or uploaded at any other time.

There is no wake word, no voice activation and no background listening. Holding the key is the only thing that starts a recording.

Your clipboard and your selected text

JotMic can tidy a dictation and can rewrite text you have highlighted. When that runs on the hosted path, the following is sent to our service and forwarded to the same provider: the text you just dictated, the contents of your clipboard, the text you have selected, and the name of the application you are dictating into. This is what lets it match the surrounding writing and act on a selection. As with audio, none of it is stored by us and none of it is logged.

This is the most sensitive thing the app transmits. If your clipboard holds a password, a key or a private document at the moment you dictate, that is what gets sent. If that matters to you, turn on On-device only, which keeps the whole pass on your Mac.

Your vocabulary list

Words you add in the Vocabulary screen are stored on your Mac, and on the hosted path that list is sent with every transcription request — that is the mechanism by which it improves the result. Do not put anything secret in it.

What you dictate

JotMic keeps a history of your dictations on your own Mac, in a local database. It is never uploaded, never sent to us, and never seen by us. You can turn the history off entirely or delete it from the Activity screen. Deleting the app and its data folder removes it along with everything else stored locally.

How much you use it

For every account, including one still on the free tier, we count three things per calendar month: the seconds of audio transcribed, the number of requests made, and how many words each transcript contained. This is how the free allowance and the plan limits are enforced.

The word count is a number, not your words. We count them and keep the total; we do not keep the text they were counted from. It is worth stating plainly because a word count is derived from what you said, where a duration is not — so this is slightly more than we used to record about you, and you should know that rather than discover it.

This includes on-device dictation. When transcription runs on your Mac there is no server request to count, so the app itself reports the number of seconds and the number of words afterwards. The audio and the text still never leave your machine; only the two numbers do.

Payments

Payments are processed by Dodo Payments, acting as merchant of record. Your card details go to them and are never sent to us or stored by us. We keep the identifiers they give us — a customer id, a subscription id, its status and its renewal date — so that your plan can be applied to your account, and we keep the notifications they send us about changes to your subscription.

Signing in from the app

The desktop app signs you in by opening your browser. To hand the session back it stores a hashed one-time code, tied to the specific app window that requested it, which expires after five minutes. The code itself is never stored — only a hash of it — and the record is deleted once used or expired.

Updates and model downloads

The app checks for a new version on launch and every six hours. On first run it also downloads the on-device speech model, which is fetched from Hugging Face, and a small pronunciation model from our own file storage. As with any download, these requests reveal your IP address and the version you are running to the server serving the file. They carry no account information and nothing about your dictation.

What the app measures

Since 10 September 2026 the app sends usage events to Mixpanel. Until then it sent none, and this page said so. The measurement moved from Google Analytics to Mixpanel on 17 September 2026; what is sent did not change, and the list below is still all of it. That changed because we could not otherwise tell how many people who download JotMic ever get it working — the gap between an install and a first working dictation was invisible to us, and it is the part of the product most likely to be broken.

This is everything it sends. That the app launched, and its version, operating system and processor type. Whether it holds the microphone and Accessibility permissions. Whether you finished the setup wizard. That you completed your first dictation. And, for each dictation after that: which engine ran it, how many words it produced, how long the audio was, and whether the text was successfully inserted.

It never sends anything you dictated. Not the transcript, not a fragment of it, not the audio, and not the name of the app you were dictating into — that last one stays in the local history precisely because a list of where you type is a profile rather than a measurement. Your email address and account identifier are never sent either, so what Mixpanel receives is not joined to your account.

You are identified by a random number generated on your own machine. It is created the first time the app runs, stored beside your settings, and means nothing anywhere else. Deleting the app’s data folder ends it; a fresh install is a new one.

There is no setting to switch this off, and we would rather say so plainly than bury it. If that is unacceptable to you, a firewall rule blocking api.mixpanel.com stops it and the app works exactly as before — nothing in JotMic checks whether these requests arrived. You can also ask us to delete what has been collected for your install; see Your rights.

Nothing is sent from a development build, and nothing is sent before the app has launched.

This website

The website has been measured since 6 September 2026, by Google Analytics until 17 September 2026 and by Mixpanel since.

The site runs Mixpanel. It records which pages you opened, roughly where in the world you were, the browser and device you used, and which link or search sent you here. It stores a random identifier in your browser so that a second visit is recognised as the same browser rather than as a new person, and Mixpanel uses your IP address to do the location lookup — it does not report that address to us.

It is not joined to your account unless you sign in. We never send Mixpanel anything you dictated. On the account pages, and only there, we do tell it your account identifier and email address, so that we can see whether the people who sign up are the people who go on to use the app. Every other page on this site is counted without knowing who you are. We use this to learn which pages explain the product and which ones lose people, and for nothing else. It is not used for advertising, and there is no ad network on this site.

Refusing it costs you nothing. Any content blocker stops it, and clearing this site’s data in your browser erases the identifier — every page works identically either way. We do not detect blocking and we do not ask twice.

The site sets one other cookie once you sign in, and that one is the session itself: it is what keeps you signed in from one page to the next, and the account pages cannot work without it.

The two are kept apart. The website and the app now report into the same Mixpanel project — they used to be in two separate Google Analytics properties — and they are still never joined. The app is counted by its random install number and nothing else; the app never sends your account identifier, and the website never sends the install number. Nothing tells us that the person reading this page is the person running that copy of the app, and we do not intend to change that. If we ever did, this page would say so before it happened.

What we never collect

• Screenshots, screen contents, or anything about what is on your display.
• Keystrokes. The app watches for the one modifier key that starts dictation and reads nothing else you type.
• The content of anything you dictate, anywhere, for any purpose — including the usage events described above, which carry counts and never words.
• The names of the applications you dictate into. The app knows, because it has to type into them; it is never sent anywhere.
• Session recordings, screen recordings, or keystroke logs. The usage events are counters, not a reconstruction of what you did.
• Your contacts, files, location, calendar, or camera.
• Advertising identifiers. We run no advertising and no ad network code.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use anything you dictate to train models — ours or anyone else’s.

Who else processes your data

We keep the list of companies involved as short as we can. It is currently six, and this is all of them:

• Supabase — hosts our database, our sign-in, our server functions and our downloads. Your email address, plan and usage counts live here.
• Groq — performs hosted speech recognition and the hosted text-cleanup pass. It receives audio, and, when you use the cleanup feature, the text described above. It is contracted not to retain any of it.
• Dodo Payments — merchant of record. Handles checkout, cards, invoices and tax.
• Resend — delivers your sign-in codes and account emails. It sees your email address and the contents of those messages.
• Hugging Face — serves the on-device model file on first run. It sees only the download request.
• Mixpanel — measures the website and the app. From the website it sees the pages you open on jotmic.com and the IP address you opened them from, and on the account pages your email address and account identifier. From the app it sees the usage events listed above, tied to a random install number and to no account. It receives nothing you dictated, and the two sets of data are never joined to each other.

These providers operate servers outside India and outside your own country, so using JotMic involves transferring the data described above internationally. Where we can choose, we choose providers that do not retain content.

How long we keep things

• Audio and transcripts — not retained. They exist only for the duration of the request.
• Clipboard and selection text — not retained, same as above.
• Your email, plan and payment identifiers — kept while your account exists, and deleted when you ask us to.
• Usage counts — kept per month while your account exists, because they are what the allowance is measured against.
• Sign-in codes — five minutes, hashed, then deleted.
• Your dictation history — kept on your Mac for as long as you keep it. We have no copy to delete.
• Website and app analytics — held by Mixpanel for the retention window set on the project, and by us for no time at all. We keep no copy of either and export none. Anything Google Analytics collected before 17 September 2026 is held by Google under its own retention window and is no longer added to.

Security

Everything the app sends travels over TLS. Our speech provider’s API key exists only on our server and is never present in the app, so there is no credential in the download for anyone to extract. Sign-in uses one-time codes rather than passwords, so there is no password of yours for us to lose. No system is perfect, and we do not claim otherwise — but the surface here is deliberately small, because the thing most services would be breached for is something we never wrote down.

Your rights

Whatever jurisdiction you are in, you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, export it, or delete it, and you can object to our processing it. Mail surya@jotmic.com from the address you signed in with and we will act on it. There is no form and no fee.

If you are in the EU or the UK: we process your email address and plan to perform our contract with you, your usage counts under our legitimate interest in enforcing the allowance you agreed to, and your audio and text at your instruction to provide the service you asked for. The website’s analytics rest on our legitimate interest in knowing which pages work; they are not needed for the site to function, and blocking them costs you nothing. The app’s usage events rest on the same legitimate interest, in knowing whether the product works after it is installed. They are not needed for the app to function, they carry nothing you dictated, and the app ships no switch to refuse them — so if you want them stopped, write to us and we will delete what is held for your install, and you can block api.mixpanel.com to prevent more. You have the right to object to this processing, and you may complain to your local supervisory authority.

If you are in California: we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising any right under it.

Deleting your account

Mail surya@jotmic.com from the address you signed in with and your account, its usage records and its payment identifiers will be deleted. Anything stored on your own Mac — your history, your vocabulary and your settings — is removed by deleting the app and its data folder. Note that deleting your account does not cancel a subscription; cancel that first from your account page, or ask us to do both.

Children

JotMic is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has created an account, mail us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is sent or what is stored, the app will say so before the change takes effect, and the date at the top of this page will change. Changes that only clarify wording will update the date and nothing else.

Contact

Surya Kiran, sole proprietor, India. surya@jotmic.com

The terms of use cover what you are buying and what happens when a plan ends.