Otter.ai alternatives that are not Fireflies or Gong?

Everyone's jumping on the transcription bandwagon, and Otter.ai seems to be the default answer for every "How do I turn my meetings into text?" question. But before you hand over your audio files and potentially sensitive conversations to yet another venture-backed SaaS platform, have you actually considered what you're buying into? It's not just about accuracy percentages or cute features like speaker identification. It's about who ultimately controls your data, what happens when you need to leave, and what the real long-term cost is when you factor in everything beyond the monthly subscription.

The usual suspects people throw out as alternatives, like Fireflies.ai or Gong, are essentially the same model with a different coat of paint. They are still proprietary, cloud-only services that deepen your dependency on their specific ecosystem. Gong is hyper-focused on sales calls and comes with a price tag and lock-in that should make any budget-conscious or security-aware team pause. What I'm interested in are solutions that don't assume you want to be a permanent tenant in someone else's data center.

Let's talk about actual alternatives. I'm looking for tools that respect the possibility of an exit strategy. That means prioritizing solutions where you can self-host the engine, or at the very least, where you can easily extract your data in a usable, non-proprietary format without jumping through hoops. Have you evaluated running something like Whisper, whether OpenAI's version or an open-source implementation, on your own infrastructure? The compute cost might surprise you, and you gain full control over data residency and privacy. For a more packaged but still privacy-focused approach, look at tools like Sonix, which at least offers explicit data deletion and better export options, or Trint, which has stronger footing in media and journalism with robust editing features. Even Descript, while still a SaaS, gives you a different angle by treating the transcription as part of a broader audio/video editing workflow, which might reduce the need for a single-purpose tool.

My main point is this: the metric shouldn't be which tool has the shiniest AI feature this quarter. The metric should be which tool introduces the least amount of friction when you inevitably need to change, customize, or audit your workflow. What are you using that doesn't treat your meeting archives as a walled garden? I'm particularly skeptical of any service whose terms of service are vague about data usage for model training or whose API makes bulk export a second-class citizen. Just my two cents