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Toolbay Flow

Paid AI apps rebuilt free and open source: first, dictation

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A lot of paid apps are a monthly subscription wrapped around open models you could run yourself. Toolbay rebuilds them as free, open-source apps that run on your own computer, all in one free launcher for Mac and Windows. The first is Toolbay Flow: hold a key, speak, let go, and clean text appears in any app. Speech and cleanup run locally. No account needed, no word limits, no subscription. MIT licensed, and more rebuilds are on the way.

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PH · launched Oct 22, 2026 · 1 upvote (top 67%)

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Could you build this?

Partial The UI and open-model wrapper are buildable, but a usable system-wide dictation tool needs native hotkey, audio, and text-insertion code on both Mac and Windows. Running local models with acceptable latency also takes optimization expertise.

What it would actually take: A real version is a native shell (Swift/Electron or similar) with global hotkeys, microphone capture, and cross-app text injection, which differ per OS. It runs a quantized local Whisper-class model via whisper.cpp or similar, with post-processing through a small local LLM for cleanup. The hard parts are low-latency local inference and OS-level input handling that works reliably across many apps.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 88 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #44 of 89 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 211 days after the earliest competitor.

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