Background

Loofah began as a fork of anarlog, the open-source meeting notetaker from Fastrepl. I had used Anarlog for a while, but I wanted a simpler thing: local transcription, notes saved as Markdown on my own filesystem wherever possible, and very little standing between me and the files.

I called the fork Free Meeting Transcriber. The name was less a piece of branding than a guardrail for future me.

Local speech models such as Whisper and Parakeet are already very good. Computers are fast enough to run them. The basic transcription problem no longer feels like something that needs a subscription, and because your Mac does the work, there is no per-meeting service bill for me to pass on.

I understand paying for the software around a team. Shared context, permissions, cloud sync, and integrations all take work to provide. But I am mostly a one-person team. I wanted the recording, the transcript, some notes, and the files. Preferably boring files.

That last part matters to me. I can grep the notes, put them in Git, and sync them however I want. My coding agents can read them too. If Loofah disappears tomorrow, the files are still there.

Loofah remains free as in beer 🍺, with no accounts, telemetry, billing, or upsells. Bring your own hosted provider or local model if you want generated summaries. Putting a pricing page on something called Free Meeting Transcriber would have been a little embarrassing anyway. I wrote more about the original fork here.

Eventually, Free Meeting Transcriber stopped describing the app. My vault now contains every note I have taken since 2011, alongside meeting transcripts, project material, attachments, and research saved by agents. Meetings are only one part of it these days.

Loofah leaves room for what the app has become. The promise behind the old name has not changed.