Free, open-source meeting recorder for macOS. Brings your own Gemini key, transcribes in seconds, and bills you in fractions of a dollar — not $20/month flat.
Last 18-minute meeting cost $0.039. That's not a typo — it's your Gemini bill.
What you actually get
Reef Recorder is the small, opinionated tool you wanted Granola to be — minus the subscription, plus your own keys and your own files.
Bring your own key
Paste your Gemini API key in setup. It lives in your macOS Keychain, never on a server we run. Every transcript shows exact token spend — so a one-hour meeting costs less than a coffee top-up.
Local files, your folder
Pick a sessions folder once. Every recording lands as a WAV + transcript pair you can open in Finder, grep with ripgrep, or hand to another tool. No proprietary database, no export button.
GitHub sync, optional
Configure a target repo and Reef Recorder syncs sessions through your local git + git-lfs install. Same auth you already use. WAV files behind LFS, transcripts as plain markdown.
How it works
No accounts. No team plan. No "connect your calendar" wizard. The setup rail tells you what's missing; everything else gets out of the way.
Wire up the chips
Mic, system audio (via BlackHole), Gemini key, sessions folder, and optional GitHub sync. Each chip is either ready or guides you in.
Hit record
Captures mic + system audio to a single WAV. Stop when you're done. Recording finishes locally before anything touches the network.
Read the transcript
Gemini handles long recordings by chunking, falls back to a second model if the first errors, and writes a clean markdown transcript next to your WAV.
├─ audio.wav· 18m 35s · 92 MB
├─ transcript.md· 12.3 kB
└─ meta.json· cost + model
Why open source matters here
We don't resell Gemini at a markup. You connect a key Google issued you, Google charges you directly, and the app shows you the cost per session so it never feels like a mystery.
Sessions are folders. WAVs and transcripts sit in plain files you control. Move them, back them up to a NAS, grep them — it's just storage, not a vault we keep the key to.
When you turn on GitHub sync, the app uses your local git install to push to a repo you own. We don't have a server in the middle. We don't have a server at all.
Tauri frontend + Rust backend, all on GitHub under Apache 2.0. Audit the recording path, fork to add Whisper, or pin a release you trust forever.
Built in public by aigentive.
Tauri v2 · Rust · React · Apache 2.0.
Captures any meeting that plays on your Mac
System audio capture uses BlackHole 2ch — a free, open-source loopback driver. Without it, you still get mic-only recording.
Try it free. Always free.
Free for everyone, forever. You pay Google directly for the transcripts you actually run — usually a few cents per hour.
