Quern

Once, not every year.

Cloud notetakers charge every month and send your meetings to their servers to be transcribed. Quern costs £19.99 once ($19.99 in the US) and does all of it on your iPhone: the transcript, who said what, and the summary.

Coming soon to the App Store

Free for 30 days, then £19.99 once. Requires iPhone 15 Pro or later.

Year 12345Granola $840Otter, Notta ~$500Quern $19.99
Paid by the end of each year, cheapest paid plan billed yearly. Prices on 28 September 2026.

What each costs.

The cheapest paid plan of each, from its own pricing page on 28 September 2026, in US dollars as they publish them. Prices change: follow the links for today's.

  • Quern

    30-day free trial, then one unlock

    $19.99 once

    Three years
    $19.99
    Recording
    No limit
    Your audio
    Stays on your iPhone

    £19.99 in the UK, with Family Sharing.

  • Otter

    Pro, billed yearly

    $99.96 a year

    Three years
    $299.88
    Recording
    1,200 minutes a month
    Your audio
    Uploaded to Otter

    Otter's pricing

  • Notta

    Pro, billed yearly

    $97.99 a year

    Three years
    $293.97
    Recording
    1,800 minutes a month
    Your audio
    Uploaded to Notta

    Notta's pricing

  • Granola

    Business, $14 a month

    $168 a year

    Three years
    $504
    Recording
    No limit stated
    Your audio
    Processed in the cloud

    Granola's pricing

Apple's own Voice Memos is free and works on the iPhone too: it transcribes and summarises, but doesn't tell speakers apart. If you don't need to know who said what, it may be all you need.

Why it can cost the same forever.

A cloud notetaker pays for servers every minute you record. Quern uses what's already in your iPhone, so recording costs us nothing, and there's no allowance of minutes to run out of.

A cloud notetaker

  1. Your iPhone records
  2. The audio is sent to the company's servers
  3. They transcribe it, label it and summarise it
  4. You pay every month, for as long as you use it

Quern

  1. Your iPhone records
  2. Apple's on-device speech recognition transcribes it
  3. Speaker models that come with Quern tell the voices apart
  4. Apple Intelligence, on the iPhone, summarises it
  5. You pay once

Where your meetings go.

With a cloud notetaker, the recording of everyone in the room goes to that company, to be kept under its terms. With Quern there's no upload, no account and no server of ours: we couldn't read your recordings if we wanted to.

  • No upload
  • No account
  • Works in Airplane Mode

Like everything on your iPhone, Quern's recordings are in your iCloud or computer backups if those are on. The privacy policy has the detail. Therapist, lawyer, HR or journalist? Quern for confidential work.

What Quern doesn't do.

So you can tell whether it's for you before you try it.

  • Join calls

    It records the room through the iPhone's microphone. It doesn't join video calls as a bot.

  • Share with a team

    It's for one person's recordings. There's no shared workspace; export or share what you need.

  • Answer questions

    Not across all your recordings, yet. Search finds titles and any word said.

  • Run on older iPhones

    It needs iPhone 15 Pro or later, because it needs Apple Intelligence.

Free for 30 days.
Then £19.99, once.

Coming soon to the App Store

First 30 days
Free, everything works
Then
£19.99, once
Subscription
None
If you don't unlock it
Your recordings stay yours to play, read and export