cd /news/artificial-intelligence/show-hn-100-free-private-meeting-not… · home topics artificial-intelligence article
[ARTICLE · art-71614] src=oatsnote.com ↗ pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=↑ positive

Show HN: 100% Free, private meeting notes that never leave your Mac

Oats, a free meeting-notes app for Mac, processes all audio and transcription locally using Whisper and Ollama, ensuring no data ever leaves the user's machine. The app, which supports optional cloud AI keys for Claude, Gemini, or OpenAI, costs nothing because it runs entirely on-device, unlike competitors charging $10–20 per month.

read1 min views1 publishedJul 24, 2026
Show HN: 100% Free, private meeting notes that never leave your Mac
Image: source

You take the meeting. Oats quietly turns your notes into clean write-ups — right on your Mac, where nothing you say ever leaves.

Windows shows a “protected your PC” notice on first launch. Click More info, then Run anyway. It only means the app isn't code-signed yet, not that it's unsafe.

Oats hears the call through your Mac and works out who is speaking. Nothing ever joins the meeting.

Note what matters to you. When the call ends, Oats blends it with the transcript into a clean write-up.

The write-up is yours to export as a real file. It lives on your Mac, never in our cloud.

Whisper and Ollama run locally, out of the box. Prefer Claude, Gemini or OpenAI? Bring your own key.

Local by design, so the guarantee is the architecture, not a policy you have to trust.

Nothing shows up in the attendee list. Nobody has to consent to a robot they never invited.

Recordings, transcripts and notes all stay local. Wipe every trace in one click.

Not a promise. A fact. Your words never reach a server that could.

Export a file anyone can open. No login wall, no lock-in. Privileged. Clinical. Under NDA. If up a client's words isn't an option, local-first is the only kind of notetaker that works.

Everyone else charges $10–20 a month to run this in their cloud. Oats runs on your machine, so it costs us nothing, and nothing to you.

Be in the room, not behind a keyboard. Oats keeps the record.

── more in #artificial-intelligence 4 stories · sorted by recency
── more on @oats 3 stories trending now
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host
Get free account → Pricing
from €0/mo · no card required
LIVE [news/show-hn-100-free-pri…] indexed:0 read:1min 2026-07-24 ·