Freed alternative

A Freed alternative for therapists who'd rather spend the premium on privacy than polish

Freed is one of the most polished AI scribes a clinician can buy in 2026. It's fast, the mobile UX is genuinely good, real-time transcription works, and the note quality is competitive. It's also $99/mo and it's a cloud product — every session you record is uploaded, transcribed, and drafted by Freed's servers under the BAA. TherapyDraft is the same category of product (an AI scribe a serious clinician would pay for) at less than half the price, and the audio never leaves your Mac. This page is for therapists choosing between "premium-cloud" and "premium-local" — two reasonable answers to a different question each is solving.

TL;DR

Freed is a premium-tier cloud scribe ($99/mo at the standard rate, lower on annual): polished web + mobile UX, real-time transcription you can read live, multi-device access, and a strong BAA + SOC 2 posture. TherapyDraft is a $39/mo Mac-only app that does one job — drafts SOAP, DAP, BIRP, and GIRP notes from microphone audio entirely on your laptop, with the macOS sandbox blocking the audio file and the draft from ever reaching a network socket. If you want a cross-device, real-time, vendor-managed experience and the cloud upload doesn't bother you (or the BAA is the answer to your compliance question), Freed is excellent. If you'd rather pay $39 for "the audio physically cannot leave the room" and skip the BAA conversation entirely because there's no PHI to cover, that's TherapyDraft.

Why therapists compare Freed and TherapyDraft

The comparison comes up most often in three scenarios:

You're already paying $99/mo and asking what you're paying for. Freed is priced at the high end of the AI-scribe market because the cloud transcription and LLM draft pipeline costs them real money per session. The premium gets you polish and speed. If polish and speed aren't your bottleneck — if your bottleneck is the cloud upload itself — you're paying $60/mo extra for a feature you'd rather not have.
Your compliance officer asked "what happens to the audio?" Freed's answer is well-documented: the audio is encrypted in transit, stored briefly while transcription completes, then deleted under the data-retention policy in the BAA. That answer is correct and many clinicians are satisfied with it. Some clinicians (forensic, custody, public-figure caseload, board-license-fragile, malpractice-carrier-flagged) want a different answer: the audio never gets uploaded in the first place. TherapyDraft is built around that second answer.
You want a "set it and forget it" Mac workflow, not a browser tab. Freed is a web product with a mobile companion. It's well-built, but it lives in a browser. TherapyDraft is a signed, notarized native Mac app that records from the menu bar — closer to the way you already use Notion or Things on macOS than the way you use a SaaS dashboard.

If none of those are you — if you're a multi-device clinician who wants premium polish in a browser and the cloud is fine — Freed is genuinely a better fit and we'll say so.

How TherapyDraft is different

Freed's pipeline is cloud-native by design. You record in the browser or the mobile app; audio streams to Freed's infrastructure; speech-to-text runs server-side; the draft is produced by a hosted LLM; the result is written to your Freed dashboard. Every step of that chain is under Freed's BAA, the security documentation is public, and the sub-processor list is published. It's a competent cloud product and the BAA is the load-bearing legal instrument that makes it HIPAA-defensible.

TherapyDraft inverts the pipeline. The Mac app records from your microphone (built-in or external — your choice). Transcription runs locally via whisper.cpp, the Apple-Silicon-optimised port of OpenAI's Whisper family. Drafting runs locally via a 4-bit-quantized Qwen 2.5 14B model on Apple's MLX runtime. The macOS app sandbox is configured with two outbound network entitlements only: Stripe (license activation) and our update server (version checks). The audio file and the draft never traverse a network socket, by enforced sandbox policy — not by promise. You can verify it in Activity Monitor's Network tab during a session: bytes-out stays at near-zero throughout the recording.

The honest trade-off: Freed's polish (real-time live transcript, beautiful mobile, multi-device sync) comes from cloud infrastructure that we deliberately don't have. TherapyDraft's privacy posture (no PHI ever leaves the laptop, no BAA needed, no sub-processor chain to audit) comes from local hardware that Freed deliberately doesn't depend on. The two products are paying their money to optimise for different things.

Side-by-side comparison

	Freed	TherapyDraft
Where transcription runs	Freed cloud	Your Mac (whisper.cpp, local)
Where drafting runs	Freed cloud (LLM provider)	Your Mac (Qwen 14B 4-bit on MLX, local)
Session audio leaves your device	Yes (uploaded for transcription)	No (blocked by macOS sandbox entitlements)
HIPAA posture	Signed BAA with Freed (load-bearing)	No BAA needed — no PHI is transmitted
Sub-processor chain for PHI	Cloud infra + speech model + LLM + storage + retention window	None — zero sub-processors touch audio or text
Real-time transcript visible mid-session	Yes	Post-session (full draft when you stop)
Mobile (iOS / Android) capture	Yes (companion mobile app)	No — Mac only in v1
Cross-device sync	Yes (web + mobile + multi-machine)	No — tied to the Mac it's licensed on
Works offline	No (cloud-dependent)	Yes (flight mode supported end-to-end)
Note formats	SOAP, DAP, intake, treatment plan, custom templates	SOAP, DAP, BIRP, GIRP (v1)
Specialty focus	Originally physician-built; expanded to therapy	Built for licensed therapists from day one
EHR paste presets	Standard copy-paste; some integrations	Per-EHR presets (SimplePractice, TheraNest, TherapyNotes, Jane)
Tamper-evident receipt	Server-side audit log	Hash-chained JSONL on your disk (you hold the chain)
Platform	Web + iOS + Android	macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon (M1–M4)
Price (monthly)	$99/mo standard; ~$90/mo on annual	$39/mo or $349/yr — flat, unlimited
Free trial	7 days	10 sessions, no credit card

Premium-cloud vs premium-local: which premium are you paying for?

Both products sit at the upper end of the market relative to budget options like Blueprint ($0.99/session) or Mentalyc ($19.99). The thing worth being clear-eyed about is what the premium is buying you.

Freed's premium buys polish, speed, and reach. The mobile app is good. The real-time transcript is genuinely useful in some workflows (you can glance at what was said while you're still in the session, which helps when something happened 30 minutes ago that you want to ask about now). The cross-device sync means you can start in your office, finish on your iPad in the parking lot. None of that is small. It costs Freed real cloud spend and they're charging for it accordingly.
TherapyDraft's premium buys an architectural privacy posture. The product is $39/mo not $19 because building and shipping a real native Mac app — signed, notarized, sandboxed, with on-device 14B-class inference that produces clinical-grade drafts — is meaningfully more work than wrapping a cloud API. The premium isn't being paid to a cloud provider's compute bill; it's being paid for the engineering it takes to keep the audio off the network in the first place.
Both are reasonable answers to different questions. If you've audited the BAA, you trust Freed's retention policy, and what you actually want is the most polished cloud experience available, paying $99/mo is a clean trade. If you'd rather not have a BAA conversation at all because there's nothing to cover under it, paying $39/mo for the local product is the same kind of clean trade — just for a different threat model.

The wrong move in either direction is paying premium-tier money for the feature set you don't actually need. If the real-time transcript and mobile are doing nothing for your workflow, $99/mo for cloud is overpriced for you. If you need to be on a phone or a Chromebook tomorrow, $39/mo for a Mac-only app is irrelevant for you.

When Freed is still the right choice

You're not on a Mac. TherapyDraft is Apple-Silicon-only in v1. If your primary computer is Windows or a Chromebook, Freed's web app + mobile coverage is the answer. Don't fight the platform.
Your practice is multi-device by design. If you genuinely need to start a note in the office, finish it on your iPad later, and check it from your phone over the weekend, Freed's cross-device sync earns its keep. TherapyDraft is tied to the Mac it's licensed on and that's a deliberate architectural choice — privacy can't sync across devices it isn't installed on.
Real-time transcription mid-session is part of how you work. Some clinicians use the live transcript to track time-on-topic or to scroll back during the session. TherapyDraft hands you the full draft when you stop recording, not while you're still in the room. If the live read-back is load-bearing for you, Freed wins on that axis.
You want a managed cloud product, not software you maintain. Updates, model changes, new templates — Freed pushes them server-side and you get them next session. TherapyDraft updates ship as macOS app updates you accept on your schedule. For some clinicians the managed model is the feature, not the bug.
The BAA is your answer. Many clinicians' compliance frameworks are built around vendor BAAs, and the cleanest path is a vendor with a strong, well-drafted BAA. Freed has one. If "we have a signed BAA with the scribe vendor" closes the loop for your malpractice carrier and your practice policy, that's a complete answer — and changing the structure of the answer (to "we don't have a BAA because there's no PHI to cover") is more work than it's worth for the win it produces.

Trying TherapyDraft without committing to a switch

The low-risk pattern, if you're a current Freed subscriber: keep your Freed seat for the month it covers, and run TherapyDraft in parallel through the 10-session free trial. Use Freed for any session where the real-time transcript or mobile access actually matters, and use TherapyDraft for any session where it doesn't. Compare the drafts on three axes: clinical utility, minutes you spend editing, and how each product made you feel about the audio after the session. After the trial, you can stay on Freed, switch to TherapyDraft, or — surprisingly often — keep both: Freed for the sessions where premium-cloud is the right answer, TherapyDraft for the sessions where it isn't.

No credit card required for the TherapyDraft trial. No sales call. The download is signed and notarized; macOS Gatekeeper recognises it as a developer-identified app on first launch.

Join the private beta