Every AI Meeting Tool Wants a Monthly Fee. So I Built My Own

Somewhere along the way, productivity software stopped being something you buy and started being something you rent. You want an AI note-taker for your meetings? That's $18/month. You want it to also generate action items? Upgrade to Pro. Need it to work across more than one device? That's another tier. Oh, and by the way — if you ever cancel your subscription, your notes are still "in our cloud," but good luck accessing them. I got fed up with it. Not just mildly annoyed — genuinely, properly fed up. I work in enough back-to-back meetings that an AI meeting assistant would be legitimately useful to me. But I wasn't willing to hand over a recurring fee for something my laptop is already capable of doing by itself. So I built Oats AI — a free, local, open-source AI meeting assistant. No subscription. No cloud. No paywalls. Oats AI in action: live transcription and AI-generated action items, running entirely on your machine. What Oats AI Actually Does It sits quietly in the corner of you