Wispr Flow vs Aqua Voice: which free plan fits your week

Match the free plan to what you dictate

The free plan and the paid tier are the decision in two numbers. The SERP for this comparison is full of listicles that mention both in passing among eight other tools. That format answers nobody's question, because the two apps differ on exactly the numbers that decide the choice: how much you can dictate for free, and what the paid tier costs when the free allowance runs dry. The usage side comes from a year on Wispr Flow.

So the criterion comes first. If you dictate in bursts, a few paragraphs a week, the free plan ceiling is the whole decision. If dictation has replaced your keyboard the way it has replaced mine on Wispr Flow, the ceiling is irrelevant and the per-month price is what compounds. Everything below is written to serve one of those two readers. Neither section hedges, because both pricing pages were opened and read on 22 October 2026, and the usage numbers come off a real account dashboard rather than a press release.

Compare the free plans before you pay

Wispr Flow's free plan is capped at 2,000 words a week on desktop, read on the pricing page at wisprflow.ai on 22 October 2026. A week is the unit that matters here. Someone who dictates meeting notes, client replies and documentation in the same week will hit it by Wednesday. The same page adds that Flow is free for everyone, students and non-profits included, with students and educators on an education email getting 50 percent off Pro and non-profits a discounted rate.

Aqua Voice's free plan works differently. Its pricing page states that Free includes 1,000 free words and the Avalon transcription model, and that no credit card is required. The same page gives students 70 percent off Pro and Max, with monthly and annual billing available.

The structural difference is the reset. A weekly cap that refills every Monday behaves nothing like a fixed word allowance, and the pricing pages describe them in different units for exactly that reason. If you want the full breakdown of what the Wispr Flow allowance covers, the pricing write-up goes line by line through the plan table.

Check what each one costs past the free plan

Growth sits above it at 23 dollars per user per month, or 18 dollars billed annually. The page marks these tiers as available annually and keeps a Free tier at 0 dollars alongside them.

The page on costs past the free plan is one of the few pages that states both numbers in one sentence, so the annual commitment and the flexibility premium are both on record.

A third Mac option sits outside this duel: TalkTalkType counts dictations rather than words, with no word limit inside a take, and its page lists a free plan of 30 dictations a week with Max at 18 dollars a month. It is there because the unit of counting changes the answer: a weekly word cap and a weekly dictation cap do not punish the same habits.

Run both on the text you actually dictate

This is where the two apps separate, and where a comparison written from pricing pages alone goes quiet. Start with what Aqua Voice does that Wispr Flow's page does not offer in the same form. Aqua also ships beyond the Mac: its product pages list macOS, Windows, iPhone and Android. If your dictation happens on a phone or a Windows box as well as a Mac, that platform spread is a fact in Aqua's favour, and it is on their own page, dated 22 October 2026.

Set against a typing baseline, the Aalto University study from CHI 2018, which found an average of 52 words per minute, those 113 words per minute work out to 169 hours of dictation for the same 1,145,134 words that would take 367 hours to type, a gap of 198 hours. Three honesty notes travel with that number, and they come from the same releve. The 113 is dictation speed, not finished-output speed, because the counter measures neither re-reading nor corrections. The 52 is a population average, not my typing speed. And the 27-day streak is a running streak, not the period over which the million words accumulated, so dividing one by the other would produce a nonsense daily figure.

So who is each one for? If you dictate everywhere, across devices and in short bursts inside other apps, Aqua Voice's Realtime Mode and its iPhone and Android builds are the concrete difference. If dictation is your primary input, all day, in the apps you already have open, the volume numbers above are what Wispr Flow has proven on a real account. For a second head-to-head on a different axis, the Wispr Flow vs Siri comparison covers dictation for paragraphs against commands.

Set up the one you pick in five minutes

Then check the counter. On the Wispr Flow app that means watching the weekly word allowance against the 2,000 cap, because the first week tells you whether the free plan is a resting place or a corridor. On Aqua Voice it means watching the 1,000 free words drain against the Avalon model, with no card entered.

If the free allowance survives your real week, you have your answer without paying anything. If it does not, the paid tiers above are the actual price of continuing, and both pages were read this month. The full record of a year on the Wispr Flow tool lives on its catalogue page.