About Ghostly

Why I built Ghostly.

I build things for a living, I vibe-code on the side, and I have two kids who don't care about my roadmap. Ghostly started as a tool for me, because nothing on the market felt honest, fast, and fair.

Jason Bartz, creator of Ghostly
Jason Bartz
Creator of Ghostly
LinkedIn
The problem

The apps I tried all let me down in the same places.

I didn't set out to build a voice-to-text app. I just wanted one that worked. But every option I found had at least one of the following problems:

  • Too limited. The free tiers were crippled. The paid tiers still missed basics like reliable shortcuts, clean formatting, and dictionary customization.
  • Privacy concerns. Audio was shipped off to servers by default. A few had privacy policies vague enough to park a truck through.
  • Reckless with user data. Transcripts stored in the cloud with no clear retention story. Accounts, telemetry, analytics, for a tool that types for you.
  • Exorbitant pricing. SaaS-priced subscriptions for what is essentially a hotkey and a Whisper model. No thanks.

So I built the version I wanted. On-device by default. Transparent about what it does. Priced like the utility it is.

Your voice shouldn't be someone else's product. Your wallet shouldn't be either.

The itch

My days are a lot of typing.

Jira tickets. Standup updates. PR descriptions. Code review comments. Then at night, after the kids are down, I'm usually writing (notes, blog drafts, side-project specs) or vibe-coding a new project into Cursor and Claude with rambly, half-formed prompts.

Typing all of that is slow. Speaking it is fast. Ghostly has already saved me hours, and that's the version that only I was using. Now it gets to save you hours too.

What I'm building toward

A category leader, built for the people who live in their keyboard.

Made for developers and vibe coders first.

Shortcuts that don't fight your IDE. Prompts that end up in Cursor, Claude, v0, whatever chat has focus. Formatting that doesn't butcher your code.

Private by default, not by marketing.

Transcription runs on-device. No accounts, no telemetry, no analytics. If a feature needs the network, you opt in and you bring your own key.

Priced fairly, because it's a utility.

No inflated SaaS margin. No per-word metering. Ghostly should feel like something you'd pay for a good keyboard. Worth it, once, not forever.

Feature-rich, actually.

Custom dictionaries. Per-app profiles. Optional AI cleanup. A real roadmap, not a permanent beta.

Built for one of us. Shared with all of us.

If you've been waiting for a voice-to-text app that respects your privacy, your time, and your wallet, try Ghostly.

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