# WhisperTranscribe

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/whispertranscribe/ · added 2026-11-03 · updated 2026-11-03

**In short.** WhisperTranscribe (AI transcription and content generation app for recordings, Netherlands): 37K users and 4.5 million minutes transcribed in 2024, March 2025. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 3 co-founders in the Netherlands, Austria and Ukraine; AppSumo lists 1-10 employees. Launched June 2023; still running, revenue growing.

AI transcription and content generation app for recordings · Netherlands · AI-native · team of 2 to 10 · still running, revenue growing · group: Voice and audio

- Outcome: 37K users and 4.5 million minutes transcribed in 2024, March 2025 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: June 2023; months from launch to the outcome: 21
- Team: 3 co-founders in the Netherlands, Austria and Ukraine; AppSumo lists 1-10 employees
- Outside funding: Bootstrapped, per the founders
- Main factor: Distribution
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 3, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Small team, Bootstrapped, Running, B2B, Transcription

Links:

- Visit whispertranscribe.com: https://www.whispertranscribe.com/
- Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/whispertranscribe

**The product.** A desktop app for Mac and Windows that turns a recording into a transcript with speaker names, in 55 languages, and then writes summaries, show notes, blog posts and social posts from it. Users can ask questions about the transcript, cut short video clips, and record meetings without a bot joining the call.

**Why it worked.** In 2023 OpenAI sold its Whisper speech model as a cheap API, but it had no interface for non-programmers and a full transcript was too long to paste into ChatGPT. Three friends put an app around the API, added content generation for podcasters, and sold it on Product Hunt and AppSumo.

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; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

WhisperTranscribe is an app around OpenAI Whisper, a speech recognition model that turns spoken audio into text, sold by OpenAI as an API, a service that programs call over the internet. The user uploads a file or records in the app, gets a transcript with timestamps and speaker detection (labels for who speaks when), and then asks a language model to write posts or answer questions about it. Its FAQ says it now also uses AssemblyAI, another speech recognition service, and that transcripts are stored only on the user's computer.

The Internet Archive's first full copy of the site is from 26 June 2023, when the app was a one-time license and the user paid OpenAI directly. It launched on Product Hunt on 23 August 2023 and on AppSumo in December 2023. Laurin Wirth wrote on AppSumo that three friends founded it, Anne Albert, Tanya and himself, and that it is bootstrapped. The company is WhisperTranscribe B.V. in Rotterdam.

This story has no revenue figure. The headline comes from AppSumo's blog of 20 March 2025, which says the tool grew from 500 users to 37,000 users and transcribed 4.5 million minutes of audio in 2024. These are user counts that AppSumo repeated, not payments that anyone checked.

## Pricing

WhisperTranscribe prices on its pricing page, read 3 November 2026 (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 19.99 | 39.99 | 320 transcription minutes a month |
| Pro | 29.99 | 59.99 | 800 transcription minutes a month |
| Grow | 69.99 | 139.99 | 2,500 transcription minutes a month |
| Scale | 139.99 | 279.99 | 6,000 transcription minutes a month |
| Meeting Assistant | 16 | 20 | per seat; unlimited meetings, no file uploads |
| Pay-as-you-go |  |  | from US$8 per hour of audio, never expires |

Yearly billing is shown as "Save 50%" for transcription plans and "Save 20%" for the Meeting Assistant. Each transcription plan includes one free Meeting Assistant seat. Unused minutes do not roll over, according to the pricing FAQ list. In June 2023 the app was instead a US$39 one-time license with 45 free minutes, and the user paid OpenAI for each minute.

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

A three-founder transcription app launched in 2023, with 37,000 users reported by AppSumo in March 2025 and no revenue figure found

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Users, March 2025 | 37,000, up from 500 | C | AppSumo blog by Max Lin, 20 March 2025: "Since launching, it's grown from 500 users to 37,000 users". The blog does not say whether "launching" means the AppSumo deal of December 2023 or the product launch, and it does not say how many users pay. | [1] |
| Audio transcribed in 2024 | 4.5 million minutes | C | Same AppSumo blog: "In 2024 alone, the tool transcribed 4.5 million minutes of audio". | [1] |
| 4.5 million minutes in hours | 75,000 hours | calc | Calculated: 4,500,000 divided by 60. | [1] |
| Users and customers on the home page, November 2026 | "100k+ users" and "1.100+ customers" | C | The company's own claims, read 3 November 2026, not checked by anyone outside. An older feature page on the same site says "Trusted by 12,700+ customers". | [3, 8] |
| Earliest archived home page | 26 June 2023 | C | Internet Archive copy. It offered a free version with 45 minutes and a US$39 one-time premium license, with the user's own OpenAI API key, and said "Join 100s of satisfied users". | [6] |
| Product Hunt launch | 23 August 2023, number 12 of the day, 154 points | C | Product Hunt product page, read 3 November 2026. | [7] |
| AppSumo launch | December 2023 | C | AppSumo blog. The founder's posts on the deal page are dated 30 October 2023, and the page lists "Founded August 2023", which may be the date of the company rather than the app. | [1, 2] |
| Months from the first archived site to the user figure | 21 | calc | Calculated: June 2023 to March 2025. | [6, 1] |
| Team | 3 co-founders; company size 1-10 | C | Laurin Wirth on AppSumo, 30 October 2023: "We founded the company with three people and are running it together." The team page in November 2026 lists the same three founders, Anne Albert van der Galiën (engineering), Laurin Wirth (product and go-to-market) and Tetiana Filatova (product and design). AppSumo lists "1-10 employees". | [2, 5] |
| Company | WhisperTranscribe B.V., Rotterdam, KvK 92149995 | C | Team page. KvK is the Dutch chamber of commerce register. | [5] |
| Models named by the company | OpenAI Whisper, AssemblyAI, and OpenAI chat models | C | AppSumo FAQ, 2023: "OpenAI Whisper, OpenAI ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo"; deal terms name "GPT4-o mini". Home page FAQ, 2026: "OpenAI's Whisper AI and AssemblyAI". | [2, 3] |
| Outside funding | none | C | Founder on AppSumo: "We are bootstrapped". AppSumo lists "Financial stage Bootstrapped". | [2] |

How to read this table: grade C is what the company writes on its own pages or what AppSumo, its sales partner, wrote about it. A "calc" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B, and no row is a revenue figure.

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

From a one-time license for an OpenAI API wrapper in June 2023 to subscriptions and a meeting recorder in 2026. Each entry carries its grade.

- **June 2023** (grade C [6]): The site offers a desktop app around the Whisper API: 45 free minutes, then a US$39 one-time license, with the user's own OpenAI key.
- **23 August 2023** (grade C [7]): Product Hunt launch, number 12 of the day.
- **30 October 2023** (grade C [2]): Laurin Wirth posts the AppSumo deal: three tiers of lifetime access with 150 to 1,500 minutes a month. The team is three bootstrapped founders.
- **December 2023** (grade C [1]): AppSumo launch date, according to AppSumo's blog.
- **20 March 2025** (grade C [1]): AppSumo reports 37,000 users, 4.5 million minutes transcribed in 2024, in-app video cutting and Magic Chat.
- **November 2026** (grade C [3, 4]): Subscriptions from US$19.99 a month, a Meeting Assistant from US$16 a seat, and "100k+ users" on the home page.

## Why did WhisperTranscribe work?

### An interface on a cheap API

Whisper made accurate transcription cheap but needed code. The founders wrote on AppSumo that their first goal was "a nicer experience around the OpenAI Whisper API", inspired by others who did the same for the GPT API.

### Transcripts as raw material

Once a transcript exists, a language model can turn it into summaries, show notes, posts and clips. That made a commodity transcript into a content tool for podcasters, which is how the app is sold.

### Launch platforms for the first users

Product Hunt in August 2023 and an AppSumo lifetime deal in December 2023. AppSumo's blog counts growth from 500 to 37,000 users after the deal.

## How it was built

These details come from the company's own pages and the founders' AppSumo posts. They are grade C.

- A desktop app for Mac and Windows. In 2023 minimal user data sat on servers in Frankfurt, and audio, transcripts and generated text stayed on the user's device.
- Speech recognition with OpenAI Whisper, later also AssemblyAI; text generation with OpenAI chat models.
- The marketing site is built with Framer and loads PostHog analytics, according to its page source.
- An affiliate program pays 25% of a referred customer's payments for 12 months, as the affiliate page states.

Sources: [2, 3, 9]

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

Two companies in our database of failed startups sold speech technology or cross-platform media tools and lost to larger platforms. 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.

### Tellme (1999 to 2011; funding US$238M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Voice commands to get information by phone, without a screen.
- Why it died: Smartphone apps and voice assistants from large platforms replaced phone voice services.
- Record: 

### Pixelpipe (2008 to 2013; funding US$2M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: Post photos, video and audio to many sites in one step.
- Why it died: The social networks closed their APIs and built cross-posting in themselves.
- Record: 

## What changed

Tellme built its own speech technology and, according to our database of failed startups, raised US$238 million before larger platforms overtook it. WhisperTranscribe rents speech recognition from OpenAI and AssemblyAI, so three people could ship an app in weeks. Pixelpipe shows the risk on the other side: a tool that depends on other platforms' APIs and import paths can lose them when those platforms change their rules.

## Can one person copy WhisperTranscribe now?

**Verdict: Yes, the method is open; the market is crowded.**

Wrapping a speech API in a simple app and adding content generation needs little capital, and many competitors now do the same. The company's later steps, subscriptions by minutes and a meeting recorder, show where it looked for recurring payments.

1. Pick a strong model that is sold only as an API, and build the interface that non-programmers need.
2. Add one step after the model's output that saves real work, here posts and show notes from a transcript.
3. Use Product Hunt and a lifetime deal to find the first thousands of users, then move new users to subscriptions.

**What is still open.** Transcription for one profession with its own vocabulary and formats, for example sermons, focus groups or research interviews, which the site already targets with separate pages.

## What could go wrong for WhisperTranscribe?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure was found. There is no TrustMRR profile, no founder interview with numbers and no filing among the sources. The headline user count is AppSumo's statement of March 2025, which repeats what the company told it, and AppSumo, a sales partner, does not say how many users pay. A reader could look for the annual accounts of WhisperTranscribe B.V. (KvK 92149995) in the Dutch register, or a founder interview with revenue.
- **User counts that do not agree.** On 3 November 2026 the home page says "Trusted by 100k+ users" and "1.100+ customers"; a feature page on the same site says "Trusted by 12,700+ customers"; AppSumo reported 37,000 users in March 2025. The company does not define user or customer, and no one outside has checked these counts.
- **Other people's recordings and media.** The app can import YouTube and Vimeo links and podcast RSS feeds. AppSumo's 2023 deal text said "you'll be able to transcribe any podcast and convert them into shareable text posts". The company's FAQ gives the user ownership of transcripts only "if you are the owner of the initial audio/video uploaded". The Meeting Assistant records calls with "No bot needed", so other people in a call may not see a notice; in many places recording needs everyone's consent, and that duty sits with the user.
- **Rented models.** Transcription and text generation run on OpenAI and AssemblyAI. A price change or a better free feature from those providers, or from meeting tools that transcribe by themselves, affects the product directly.

## Sources

1. AppSumo blog, Max Lin, 20 March 2025: 15 Years of AppSumo: Partner Stories Then & Now — https://appsumo.com/blog/15-years-of-appsumo-partner-stories (grade C). Read the section on WhisperTranscribe, from the pipeline's copy downloaded 27 October 2026. Source for the 37,000 users, the 4.5 million minutes and the December 2023 launch date.
2. AppSumo deal page: WhisperTranscribe, with Laurin Wirth's posts of 30 October 2023 — https://appsumo.com/products/whispertranscribe/ (grade C). Read in full, from the pipeline's copy downloaded 27 October 2026. Source for the founders, team, funding, models, data storage, deal tiers and company details.
3. WhisperTranscribe home page, read 3 November 2026 — https://www.whispertranscribe.com/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the features, FAQ, user and customer claims, models and testimonials.
4. WhisperTranscribe pricing page, read 3 November 2026 — https://www.whispertranscribe.com/pricing (grade C). Read in full. Source for the pricing table.
5. WhisperTranscribe team page, read 3 November 2026 — https://www.whispertranscribe.com/team (grade C). Read in full. Source for the three founders' full names and roles and the company register number.
6. Internet Archive copy of whispertranscribe.com, 26 June 2023 — https://web.archive.org/web/20230626145408/https://www.whispertranscribe.com/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the first product, the one-time price and the earliest date.
7. Product Hunt: WhisperTranscribe, Create content from your audio — https://www.producthunt.com/products/whispertranscribe (grade C). Read the launch details, read 3 November 2026. Source for the launch date, day rank and points.
8. WhisperTranscribe: AI YouTube and Podcast Quote Finder page, read 3 November 2026 — https://www.whispertranscribe.com/YouTube-and-podcast-quote-finder (grade C). Read in full. Source for the "12,700+ customers" claim.
9. WhisperTranscribe affiliate program page, read 3 November 2026 — https://www.whispertranscribe.com/affiliate-program (grade C). Read in full. Source for the commission terms.
10. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.