Hi HN! We're Yujong, John, Duck, and Sung from Hyprnote (https://hyprnote.com). We're building an open-source, privacy-first AI note-taking app that runs fully on-device. Think of it as an open-source Granola. No Zoom bots, no cloud APIs, no data ever leaves your machine.
Source code: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote Demo video: https://hyprnote.com/demo
We built Hyprnote because some of our friends told us that their companies banned certain meeting notetakers due to data concerns, or they simply felt uncomfortable sending data to unknown servers. So they went back to manual note-taking - losing focus during meetings and wasting time afterward.
We asked: could we build something just as useful, but completely local?
Hyprnote is a desktop app that transcribes and summarizes meetings on-device. It captures both your mic input and system audio, so you don't need to invite bots. It generates a summary based on the notes you take. Everything runs on local AI models by default, using Whisper and HyprLLM. HyprLLM is our proof-of-concept model fine-tuned from Qwen3 1.7B. We learned that summarizing meetings is a very nuanced task and that a model's raw intelligence (or weight) doesn't matter THAT much. We'll release more details on evaluation and training once we finish the 2nd iteration of the model (still not that good we can make it a lot better).
Whisper inference: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/blob/main/crates/whispe...
AEC inference: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/blob/main/crates/aec/sr...
LLM inference: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/blob/main/crates/llama/...
We also learned that for some folks, having full data controllability was as important as privacy. So we support custom endpoints, allowing users to bring in their company's internal LLM. For teams that need integrations, collaboration, or admin controls, we're working on an optional server component that can be self-hosted. Lastly, we're exploring ways to make Hyprnote work like VSCode, so you can install extensions and build your own workflows around your meetings.
We believe privacy-first tools, powered by local models, are going to unlock the next wave of real-world AI apps.
We're here and looking forward to your comments!
I'm always amazed at these relatively tiny projects that "launch" with a "customers" list that reads like they've spent 10 years doing hard outbound enterprise sales: Google, Intel, Apple, Amazon, Deloitte, IBM, Ford, Meta, Uber, Tencent, etc.
This one is especially bad because I doubt all of those companies allow employees to install unapproved software that records meetings and uses so many 3rd party APIs
The social proof logo list is an old scheme on the growth hacking checklist. There was a time when it was supposed to mean the company had purchased the software. Now it just means they knew someone who worked at those companies who said they’d check it out.
At this point, when I visit a small product’s landing page and see the logo list the first thing I think of is that they’re small and desperate to convince me they’re not.
Yeah, IBM employee here, not speaking on behalf of the company, own opinions etc. The odds this is approved for employee use are essentially zero.
We’re firmly in a world where “cheat on everything” is an acceptable business, startups that were hacked together in a week at YC claim they have SOC2 and vibecoded GPT wrappers claim they “trained a model”. Shameless lying took over tech, and if anyone catches you lying, you double down, make a scene and a bunch of podcasts will talk about you. Free advertising!
Of course, dishonesty is as old as time, but these last couple of years have been hard to watch…
have to admit that we did some logo plays. but our users are really all over the place and just wanted to show it off! i am not sure how it looked but that's why we didn't use terms like "teams" or "customers" to be honest while showing some validation.
"Logo play" is such a YCombinator word for Lie.
It says "Our users are everywhere" and shows some logos for the companies these users are from.
If the users are from those companies, this is not lying.
If they added logos for companies their users are not from, it would be lying.
Adding a logo to your webpage has started to follow different patterns for the stage of the company.
Early stage companies show things like "people at X, Y, Z use our product!" (showing logos without permission), whilst later stage ones tend to show logos after asking for permission, and with more formal case studies.
They may not have asked for permission to show these logos, but that's not the same thing as lying.
> i am not sure how it looked
Well, it looks a lot like you're playing word games to get clout-by-association that you don't necessarily deserve. That doesn't seem like something an authentic person (or people) would try to do. Are the other claims about your team and software equally unserious?
> we did some logo plays
Help me understand what this means
The most honest version is the company is paying for the tool. The most stretched version I’ve seen is a former employee of a company uses the tool in a personal capacity. Most commonly for newly launched things it means someone with an @company email has tried the tool (even if they didn’t pay). You could, for example, set up a waitlist and then let anyone with a logo-worthy email in.
to show that we are acknowledged by many users from various orgs. we listed users who talked to, but we do not know if they still use it as some of them are not reachable(lost contact). i am admitting that we wanted to seem official so that's why we had all these logos where our users are "from".
Congrats on the launch. I never understood why an AI meeting notetaker needed sota LLMs and subscriptions (talking about literally all the other notetakers) - thanks for making it local first. I use a locally patched up whisperx + qwen3:1.7 + nomic embed (ofcourse with a swift script that picks up the audio buffer from microphone) and it works just fine. Rarely i create next steps / sop from the transcript - i use gemini 2.5 and export it as pdf. I’ll give Hyprnote a try soon.
I hope, since it’s opensource, you are thinking about exposing api / hooks for downstream tasks.
> I never understood why an AI meeting notetaker needed sota LLMs and subscriptions
I’m the opposite: If something is expected to accurately summarize business content, I want to use the best possible model for it.
The difference between a quantized local model that can run on the average laptop and the latest models from Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI is still very significant.
What kind of API/Hooks you expect us to expose? We are down to do that.
registering an MCP server and calling an MCP tool upon transcript completion (and/or summary completion) would help (check out actionsperminute.io for the vision there).
Calendar integration would be nice to link transcripts to discrete meetings.
That makes sense.
Please add more details here: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/issues/1203
For calendar, we have native Apple Calendar integration in MacOS.
The ability to receive live transcripts from a webhook, including speaker diarization metadata would be super useful.
webhook to the localhost server, right?
Can you share the Swift script? I was thinking of doing something similar but was banging my head against the audio side of macOS.
I just tried to build on Linux and it keeps panicking because it requires dozen(s) of API keys. I was not expecting that from local first software.
That is not actually required. You can even set empty key for that.
Also Linux issue pointer: https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/issues/67#issuecomment-...
I'm also interested in learning about why the API keys are required to build.
There are only 2 api keys that is required to build (POSTHOG, SENTRY), and also not required to build in dev, only in release build.
I made it required to prevent accidentally ship app without any analytics/error tracking. (analytics can be opted out)
For ex, https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/blob/327ef376c1091d093c...
EDIT: Prod -> release
I just tried this for a standup meeting, and the inability to tell who said what is a show stopper. You'll need to add speaker diarization for this to be useful for more than 1:1s.
Nice!
Would be great if you could include in your launch message how you plan to monetize this. Everybody likes open source software and local-first is excellent too, but if you mention YC too then everybody also knows that there is no free lunch, so what's coming down the line would be good to know before deciding whether to give it a shot or just move on.
For individuals:
We have a Pro license implemented in our app. Some non-essential features like custom templates or multi-turn chat are gated behind a paid license. (A custom STT model will also be included soon.) There's still no sign-up required. We use keygen.sh to generate offline-verifiable license keys. Currently, it's priced at $179/year.
For business:
If they want to self-host some kind of admin server with integrations, access control, and SSO, we plan to sell a business license.
Does that mean the admin server is not open source?
no. it is open source. https://github.com/fastrepl/hyprnote/tree/main/apps/admin
Another sso.tax candidate.
Let's actively not support software that chooses anti-security.
totally fair concern. we’re actually on the same side when it comes to promoting good security practices like SSO.
the reason we’re gating the admin server under a business license is less about profiting off sso and more about drawing a line between individual and organizational use. it includes a bunch of enterprise-specific features (sso, access control, integrations, ...) that typically require more support and maintenance.
that said, the core app is fully open-source and always will be - so individuals and teams who don’t need the admin layer can still use it freely and privately, without compromising security.
we’ll keep listening and evolving the model - after all, we're still very early and flexible. appreciate the pushback.
(edit: added some more words to reinforce our flexibility)
Looks great & kudos for making it local-first & open-source, much appreciated!
From a business perspective, and as someone looking also into the open-source model to launch tools, I'd be interested though how you expect revenue to be generated?
Is it solely relying on the audience segment that doesn't know how to hook up the API manually to use the open-source version? How do you calculate this, since pushing it via open-source/github you would think that most people exposed to it are technical enough to just run it from source.
I mentioned about the monetization plan in other threads! (search with 'license').
Hope that make sense
Any plans to integrate with native Apple Notes app?
what kind of integration you expect? export?
I honestly don't care that much if Granola uploads my notes to some external service. Work conversations are not private anyways.
HOWEVER, I was extremely disturbed to find out that Granola was automatically making each of my notes folders public to the entire organization. Including 1:1s, you guessed it.
Yeah, really shook my trust in this product by a lot.
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