What Transcribier and Best-I have in common
The two apps solve unrelated problems. One turns speech into text. The other helps you see where your energy is going during a week. What they share is the way they are built.
Both are native Apple apps, written against the system rather than wrapped around a web page. Both are arranged so that the sensitive part, your recordings and your journal, never lands on a server I own. And both come from one person, which shows up in the small decisions more than the big ones: what gets left out, and how a screen behaves when you are in a hurry.
That last part is a constraint as much as a choice. One person cannot ship six apps properly, so these two get everything. The about page covers the person behind them if that is what you came for.
What is Transcribier?
Transcribier is dictation that works anywhere you can type. You press a global shortcut on the Mac or switch to the Transcribier keyboard on iPhone and iPad, you talk, and the words land in whatever text field you were already in, whether that is a mail draft or a commit message. The tagline on the product site puts it better than I can: your fastest keyboard does not have keys.
Transcription runs on ElevenLabs Scribe across 16 languages, live while you speak or after the recording, whichever suits the moment. The part that matters most is where the audio goes. You bring your own ElevenLabs key, so recordings travel from your device straight to your own ElevenLabs account rather than through anything of mine. The key itself sits in the Apple Keychain, iPhone can put a Face ID or Touch ID lock in front of the app, and privacy mode deletes the recording once the text exists.
Dictation is free and unlimited, with no account and no credit card. Pro costs EUR 4.99 per month or EUR 39.99 per year, and adds three things:
- transcribing audio and video files you already have
- reading PDFs out loud
- voice isolation
Around that sit 15 voice commands in Dutch and English, a personal dictionary, reusable snippets, optional rewriting or summarising with Claude using your own key, automatic ordering by topic, and sync through your own iCloud. Transcribier runs on Mac, iPhone and iPad, and it is not in the App Store yet. There is a waiting list at transcribier.com, and the full Transcribier page goes through the rest feature by feature.
What is Best-I?
Best-I is a Dutch-language iPhone app built around one question: weet waar je energie blijft, which is to say, know where your energy goes. Instead of a single mood score it tracks four batteries: physical foundation, emotional connection, mental direction and meaning. Each has four levels with an explanation of what that level means, and the app takes whichever battery is lowest and turns it into one focus for the coming week, with concrete actions attached. Weeks stack up into charts, so you can see the pattern rather than guess at it.
Underneath sits an encrypted journal that holds more than text: photos, video, voice memos, drawings and PDFs. Entries can pick up context from photos, calendar, sleep, movement, location and weather, and you can read your history back as a timeline, a calendar, a map or a photo grid. You define your own life phases, you can share a collection with family by handing over the encryption key, and any phase, or the entire history, exports to PDF.
Everything is encrypted with AES-256-GCM. The keys are generated on your device and stay in its keychain, sync goes through your own iCloud account, and search runs entirely on the phone. Best-I is iPhone only, the app itself is in Dutch, and it went by the name Memoir before. It is not in the App Store yet either. The full Best-I page has the detail, and the product site is best-i.synccy.com.
What does "your data stays yours" actually mean?
Private is the least specific word in app marketing, so here is what it means in these two. There are roughly three promises hiding under that word, and they are not worth the same.
The weakest is we do not sell your data. Your data still sits on someone else's server, and the promise lasts exactly as long as the company making it, its funding and its terms of service. The middle one is on-device, meaning the work happens on your hardware, which is real and useful. Best-I searches your journal on the phone rather than sending an index somewhere.
The third is the one I actually build for, and it is about accounts rather than servers. Best-I syncs through your iCloud, not a database of mine. Transcribier sends audio to your ElevenLabs account, using your key. In both cases there is no server of mine in the path, which also means there is no server of mine to breach, to lose, or to quietly change its mind in two years.
That model has an edge worth naming out loud. Best-I encrypts your entries, but not the metadata around them: iCloud can still see how many notes there are, when they were written, and when a scan was done. That is a genuine limitation, and I would rather you read it here than discover it later.
Neither app carries analytics, advertising or crash-reporting SDKs from anyone. Transcribier has no telemetry at all. The cost of that is mine: no dashboard telling me which features get used, and no stack trace when something breaks, so I hear about a crash when somebody writes to me about it. For an app that listens to everything you say, that is the right side of the trade.
The last piece is less about data and more about feel. I build with Swift and SwiftUI and reach for the system's own frameworks, SwiftData, CloudKit, StoreKit, WidgetKit and the rest, instead of shipping a browser in a wrapper. What I want is an app that belongs on the platform: fast, quiet, and built with the system rather than against it. No Electron, no compromise.
Can I download Transcribier or Best-I yet?
No, and you will not find a download button anywhere on this page, because there is nothing behind it yet. Transcribier is not released, and the waiting list at transcribier.com is where it gets announced first. Best-I is not released either, and is coming to the App Store for iPhone.
I would rather write that plainly than dress it up. Releasing is the hard half of this work. An app that runs on my machine is not a product, and it does not become one because a website says so.
If you want the longer version of who is behind these, that is the about page. Alongside my own apps I take on freelance work, so if you need someone who can take an idea all the way to a shipped product, the freelance page explains how that goes.