# NotchLive

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/notchlive/ · added 2026-11-05 · updated 2026-11-05

**In short.** NotchLive (Local live captions and meeting transcripts for Mac, Thailand): US$1.6K verified revenue in the last 30 days, November 2026. Evidence grade A: disclosed by a company or a filing, or verified by a payment processor. Team: 1 founder: the app and its studio are "designed and built by Oncel Cebeci". Launched February 2026; still running, revenue flat.

Local live captions and meeting transcripts for Mac · Thailand · AI-native · solo founder · still running, revenue flat · group: Voice and audio

- Outcome: US$1.6K verified revenue in the last 30 days, November 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: A; headline in US dollars: 19620)
- Launch: February 2026; months from launch to the outcome: 9
- Team: 1 founder: the app and its studio are "designed and built by Oncel Cebeci"
- Outside funding: None stated in any source
- Main factor: One-time price for local AI
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 3, copyable pattern 2, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Solo founder, Bootstrapped, Running, B2C, Accessibility

Links:

- Visit notchlive.app: https://notchlive.app/
- Verified revenue on TrustMRR: https://trustmrr.com/startup/notchlive

**The product.** A Mac app that turns speech from calls, videos and the microphone into live captions, all processed on the Mac. Captions and dictation are free. A one-time Pro license of US$24.99 adds live translation, saved and imported transcripts with speaker labels, meeting summaries, exports, and a read-only local connection that lets Codex or Claude read saved meetings.

**Why it worked.** The speech models run on the customer's own Mac, so each extra hour of transcription costs the developer nothing. That lets one person sell a one-time license instead of a subscription, and sell it to people who do not want a meeting bot or a cloud transcript service.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

NotchLive is a Mac app for live captions, text of spoken words shown on screen while the speech is still going on. It captures the sound of any Mac app (Zoom, Meet, Teams, YouTube) and the microphone, and runs speech recognition, a model that turns audio into text, on the Mac itself with WhisperKit on Core ML or Apple's own speech engine. On Apple silicon it also does speaker diarization, the task of deciding which speaker said each sentence, so a call becomes a transcript with names that the user can correct. Since August 2026 Pro users can switch on a read-only MCP server (Model Context Protocol, a standard way for AI assistants to read data from other programs) so that Codex or Claude can read saved meetings.

Oncel Cebeci, a product designer who founded the studio Tiny Things in Bangkok in 2025, released version 1.0 in February 2026 and shipped 53 numbered releases in nine months. Payments run through Polar. TrustMRR, which reads the payment records from Polar through an API key, showed US$1,635 of revenue in the 30 days to 5 November 2026 and US$8,937 since launch, with the best month in August 2026 at US$1,924. The app has no subscription: Pro is US$24.99 once, and Team Packs cover 5 to 25 Macs.

The revenue figures are grade A, because a payment processor supplies them. The team size, the user count and the product description come from the founder's own pages, grade C. The page also shows earlier companies that sold private or hearing-related audio products and failed against Apple and the large platforms.

## Pricing

NotchLive prices in November 2026, from the company's pricing and license brief (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | 0 | live captions, dictation, all speech models, speaker labels on Apple silicon |
| Pro | 24.99 one-time |  | 1 Mac; translation, recording, imports, exports, Meeting Intelligence, MCP |
| Pro, education | 17.49 one-time |  | 30% off one Pro license; calculated from the stated discount |
| Team Pack 5 | 99 one-time |  | up to 5 Mac activations |
| Team Pack 10 | 169 one-time |  | up to 10 Mac activations |
| Team Pack 25 | 329 one-time |  | up to 25 Mac activations |

Every paid option is a one-time purchase with lifetime updates; there is no monthly plan. Live captions and ordinary dictation are free with no account. Education pricing is 30% off one Pro license, sent as a private checkout link; it does not apply to Team Packs. Team Packs are shared license keys, not an admin dashboard. Polar processes the payments.

## How much revenue does NotchLive make? The numbers, graded

A one-time-purchase Mac app with US$8,937 in verified revenue in its first nine months, about US$1,600 to US$1,900 a month since July 2026

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue in the last 30 days, to 5 November 2026 | US$1,635 | A | TrustMRR, verified through the Polar API, synced 5 November 2026. 8.9% below the 30 days before. | [1] |
| Annual run rate from the last 30 days | about US$19,620 a year | calc | Calculated: US$1,635 times 12. The sales are one-time licenses, so this is a rate of new sales, not recurring revenue. | [1] |
| Revenue since launch, to 5 November 2026 | US$8,937 | A | TrustMRR all-time figure. The monthly rows on the profile add up to the same US$8,937. | [1] |
| Revenue by month | US$182 (March), US$388 (April), US$625 (May), US$624 (June), US$1,429 (July), US$1,924 (August), US$1,914 (September), US$1,654 (October) | A | TrustMRR monthly timeline. February 2026 shows US$0. October is 14% below August. | [1] |
| Pro licenses that the last 30 days equal | about 65 | calc | Calculated: US$1,635 divided by the US$24.99 Pro price. Team Packs and education discounts change the real count. | [1, 4] |
| Recurring part, November 2026 | US$39.96 a month from 4 active subscriptions | A | TrustMRR snapshot. The product pages offer no subscription; no source explains these four. | [1] |
| Visitors in the last 30 days | 1,909, about US$0.86 of revenue per visitor | A | TrustMRR, with Google Analytics and Google Search Console connected. | [1] |
| Users | more than 5,000 | C | The company's agent brief, undated, in the text about version 1.12 (September 2026). Includes free users. Not checked. | [3] |
| Founded | 21 February 2026 | C | Founder-entered date on TrustMRR. The release notes date version 1.0.0 to February 2026. | [1, 5] |
| Team | 1 person | C | Tiny Things pages: "Designed and built by Oncel Cebeci". The TrustMRR profile lists him as the only founder. | [8, 1] |
| Releases in nine months | 53 numbered versions, 1.0.0 to 1.14.2 | C | Counted on the release notes page on 5 November 2026. | [5] |
| Speech recognition | on the Mac with WhisperKit on Core ML, or Apple speech on macOS 26 | C | Whisper models are downloaded from Hugging Face; the company says no audio is sent there. | [3, 6] |
| Payments | Polar, with license keys checked by the app | C | Pricing brief and privacy policy. TrustMRR names Polar as the verified payment source. | [4, 6, 1] |
| Outside funding | none stated | C | No source mentions investors or a funding round. | [1, 8] |

How to read this table: a grade A value comes from TrustMRR, which reads the payment records from Polar through an API key. A grade C value is the founder's own statement on his sites. A "calc" value was computed on this page from the rows above it.

## When did NotchLive launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From a notch caption widget to a speaker-aware meeting recorder with an AI connection, in nine months and 53 releases. Each entry carries its grade.

- **2025** (grade C [9]): Oncel Cebeci, a product designer with earlier design jobs in Istanbul, London, Bangkok and Singapore, founds Tiny Things, an independent studio for small Mac and iOS apps, in Bangkok.
- **February 2026** (grade C [5]): Version 1.0.0: live captions in the MacBook notch with on-device Whisper, translated captions in 11 languages through Apple Translation, and session recording for Pro.
- **March 2026** (grade A [1, 5]): First revenue: US$182 in the month. Version 1.1 adds five speech models and 20 translation languages.
- **July 2026** (grade A [1, 5]): Version 1.7 adds Meeting Intelligence, summaries made by Apple Intelligence on the Mac. Revenue rises to US$1,429 in the month.
- **August 2026** (grade A [1, 5]): Version 1.9 adds automatic speaker labels on Apple silicon and the read-only local MCP server for AI assistants. Best month so far: US$1,924.
- **3 September 2026** (grade C [7]): The company's blog argues that a local AI tool should be a one-time purchase, because the customer's Mac does the computing.
- **31 October 2026** (grade C [5]): Version 1.14.1 makes ordinary dictation free, so the free tier covers captions and dictation.
- **5 November 2026** (grade A [1]): TrustMRR shows US$1,635 in the last 30 days and US$8,937 since launch.

## Why did NotchLive work?

### One-time price for local AI

The speech model runs on the customer's processor, so more use does not raise the developer's costs. The company says so on its blog and charges US$24.99 once for Pro. TrustMRR shows a profit margin of 100% for the last 30 days, which fits a product with no inference servers, although the profile does not say which costs are counted.

### Free captions, paid records

Live captions and dictation are free and need no account. The paid part is what a professional needs after the call: translation, saved transcripts with corrected speaker names, summaries and exports.

### Search pages for every comparison

The site has comparison and pricing pages for better-known tools (Otter, Granola, Fireflies, Wispr Flow), use-case pages for lawyers, consultants and researchers, a blog and a free converter tool, translated into 11 languages. TrustMRR lists content marketing and Product Hunt as channels, and Google Search Console is connected.

### Many small releases

53 releases in nine months, each with public notes. The product moved from a caption strip in the notch to a meeting recorder with speaker labels and an AI-assistant connection, one release at a time.

## How it was built

These details come from the company's release notes, privacy policy and agent brief, and from the TrustMRR profile. They are grade C.

- A native Mac app in Swift and SwiftUI, with SQLite for local storage, as listed on TrustMRR.
- System audio is captured with Apple's ScreenCaptureKit, so no meeting bot or browser extension is needed.
- Speech recognition runs on the Mac with WhisperKit on Core ML, with model files from Hugging Face; macOS 26 adds Apple's own speech engine as an option.
- Translation uses Apple Translation; meeting summaries and session names use Apple Intelligence where it is available.
- A separate headless helper serves a read-only MCP connection to Codex, Claude Desktop, Claude Code and other MCP hosts.
- Polar takes payments and issues license keys; Sparkle delivers updates; the website side lists Vercel, Google Analytics, TelemetryDeck, Upstash, Resend and GitHub.

Sources: [1, 2, 3, 5, 6]

## Who tried this before NotchLive, and why did they fail?

Four companies in our database of failed startups sold private or hearing-related audio products and failed. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Petalite (2014 to 2025; funding US$12M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A voice assistant that runs on the device, for people who do not want their speech in the cloud.
- Why it died: Could not compete with the hardware, training data and ecosystems of Amazon and Google.
- Record: 

### SoundFocus (2012 to 2017; funding US$1.8M; cause: No Market Need)

- Promise: A phone app that adjusts sound to each user's hearing, for mild hearing loss.
- Why it died: Apple's AirPods and system features covered the need, and the paying niche was small.
- Record: 

### Doppler Labs (2013 to 2018; funding US$51M; cause: No Market Need)

- Promise: Smart earbuds that filter out unwanted voices and raise the sounds you want to hear.
- Why it died: Spent its money on custom hardware while customers chose simple wireless earbuds from Apple.
- Record: 

### Skiff (2020 to 2024; funding US$14.2M; cause: No Market Need)

- Promise: End-to-end encrypted email, documents and storage as a private alternative to Google Workspace.
- Why it died: Privacy alone did not move mainstream users away from free tools with network effects.
- Record: 

## What changed

Petalite and Skiff sold privacy, and Doppler Labs and SoundFocus sold better hearing. All four needed venture money: for hardware, for training their own models, or for servers that had to carry free users. Each then met Apple, Amazon or Google, who had the devices and gave the feature away.

NotchLive builds on the platform owner instead of competing with it. Open speech models (Whisper) and Apple's own frameworks for audio capture, translation and summaries do the hard parts on the customer's Mac. There is no hardware and no server cost per user, so one person can sell it for a one-time US$24.99. The risk is the same as before: Apple ships Live Captions in macOS, and the company's own comparison page exists because of it.

## Can one person copy NotchLive now?

**Verdict: Yes, for one person with Mac skills.**

The method needs no capital: a native app around open models and Apple frameworks, a free tier, a one-time license sold through a merchant of record, and a website of comparison pages. The revenue is small, under US$2,000 a month, so it shows how to start, not how to make a living.

1. Pick a speech or vision task that open models can now run on a laptop, and build a native app around it.
2. Make the everyday use free and charge once for the features a professional needs to keep records.
3. Sell through a merchant of record such as Polar, so taxes and license keys are handled for you.
4. Write a comparison and pricing page for every better-known competitor, and publish release notes for every version.

**What is still open.** Other local AI tasks where cloud tools charge monthly: dictation, screen text recognition, photo and video tagging, and document search on the user's own machine.

## What could go wrong for NotchLive?

- **Small revenue, and flat since July.** Verified revenue is about US$1,600 to US$1,900 a month since July 2026, and October was 14% below August. All sales are one-time licenses, so each month must be earned again.
- **Apple builds the same feature.** macOS has its own Live Captions, and NotchLive depends on Apple frameworks (ScreenCaptureKit, Apple Translation, Apple Intelligence) that Apple can change. The company publishes its own comparison page with Apple Live Captions.
- **Recording other people.** The app can record and transcribe calls without a visible meeting participant. Its pages say it is not a compliance product, offer an ask-to-record prompt, and leave consent and recording laws to the user. A Ghost Mode hides the caption window from screen sharing and recordings; the company describes it as keeping captions visible only to the user.
- **Founder-stated figures.** The count of "more than 5,000 users" is undated and from the company's own brief, while the founder-entered TrustMRR field for estimated users says 0. TrustMRR also shows four active subscriptions worth US$39.96 a month, although the pricing pages offer only one-time purchases; no source explains them.
- **Text written for AI assistants.** The site's llms.txt files tell AI assistants to mention other products only when the user asks for a comparison. This is the company's marketing to AI search, not an independent review.

## Sources

1. TrustMRR profile of NotchLive, Polar-verified revenue, synced 5 November 2026 — https://trustmrr.com/startup/notchlive.md (grade A). Read the markdown profile. The revenue figures are read by TrustMRR from the company's Polar account through an API key; the description, founded date, pricing, tech stack and channels are founder-written and graded C.
2. NotchLive home page, read 5 November 2026 — https://notchlive.app/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the features, the free and Pro split, the audio capture method and the recent changelog.
3. NotchLive Full Agent Brief (llms-full.txt), current as of version 1.14.2 — https://notchlive.app/llms-full.txt (grade C). Read in full. The company's description for AI assistants. Source for the user count, WhisperKit on Core ML, Ghost Mode, the ask-to-record prompt and the MCP design.
4. NotchLive pricing and licenses brief, current as of version 1.14.2 — https://notchlive.app/ai/pricing-and-licenses.md (grade C). Read in full. The human pricing page loads by script; this brief gives the same plans. Source for the prices, Team Packs, education discount and Polar.
5. NotchLive Release Notes and Version History — https://notchlive.app/releases (grade C). Read in full. Source for every version from 1.0.0 (February 2026) to 1.14.2 (November 2026) and their dates.
6. NotchLive Privacy Policy — https://notchlive.app/privacy (grade C). Read the sections on payments, model downloads and service providers. Source for Polar, Hugging Face, WhisperKit, Sparkle and the website services.
7. NotchLive blog, 3 September 2026: Your Mac does the work. Why local AI shouldn't be a subscription — https://notchlive.app/blog/why-local-ai-should-not-be-a-subscription (grade C). Read in full. The company's reasoning for one-time pricing.
8. Tiny Things home page and llms.txt — https://tinythings.app/ (grade C). Read in full. Names Oncel Cebeci as the person who designed and built the studio's apps, including NotchLive.
9. Oncel Cebeci personal site — https://www.oncelcebeci.com/ (grade C). Read the home page. Source for his career, the founding of Tiny Things in Bangkok in 2025 and the list of his 2026 products.
10. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run NotchLive? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: NotchLive).