Meetily Is the Free Otter.ai Replacement Running 100% on Your Own Machine

The bill for your meeting transcription tool arrives every month whether or not you actually used it. A small indie team called Zackriya Solutions decided that was ridiculous, and built a free alternative that runs entirely on your computer.

What's happening

Meetily is an open-source AI meeting assistant that captures your audio, transcribes in real time using Parakeet and Whisper, then summarizes it using a local LLM through Ollama. No audio ever touches a server you do not own. It runs on Mac and Windows, and the desktop app is a single download.

The project hit v0.4.0 in June and has been climbing GitHub's trending charts hard this week, pulling in over 308,000 downloads mostly through word of mouth. The appeal for small teams is obvious: Otter.ai runs $17 per user per month. Granola and Fireflies have similar costs. Meetily is MIT licensed and free. The Rust-based transcription engine is reportedly 4x faster than standard Whisper because of how it parallelizes audio processing.

The team behind it is small. This is not a VC-backed startup or a Big Tech side project. Just a useful thing that keeps getting better.

Try this this week

• Grab the installer at meetily.ai or directly from the GitHub releases page. There is a one-click DMG for Mac and an EXE for Windows.
• Download Ollama (free, at ollama.com) and pull a lightweight model like llama3.2 for fully offline summaries. If you already have an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, you can point Meetily there instead.
• Open Meetily before your next call. It runs in the background and picks up whatever your mic hears.
• After the meeting, hit Summarize. Choose a template: action items, decisions made, or open questions. That last one is surprisingly useful after client calls.
• Give it three meetings before you judge it. The first one, you will be skeptical. By the third, you will wonder why you were ever typing notes manually.

The bigger picture

This is the pattern showing up across open-source AI right now: tools that used to require a vendor relationship can now run on hardware you already own. Meetily is a clean example of the build9 approach, the smallest working thing, running in your actual environment, with no third party on the line when your team talks about clients or finances. The subscription savings are real. The privacy benefit is better.