A teleprompter with no subscription and no account

Read the recent reviews of almost any teleprompter app and the same complaint comes up more than any missing feature: it used to work, then it wanted a monthly payment for something that was already there. This is about what to check before you install one.

What "free" usually means

Free on the listing usually means free to open. The common limits arrive later: a cap on script length, a watermark on anything you record, mirrored text locked behind the paid tier, or a trial that quietly starts the moment you first use the thing you downloaded it for.

Mirroring is the one worth naming, because it is the most common thing to find paywalled and the most annoying. If you use a glass teleprompter rig, the text has to be flipped or the whole setup is useless, and a version that cannot flip text is not a cheaper product, it is a broken one.

The account question

A lot of these apps ask you to sign up before you can type a script. That is worth pausing on. A teleprompter reads text on your own machine and does not need to know who you are to do it, so an account usually exists to hold your scripts on someone's server and to have somewhere to put the subscription later.

It also decides what happens when you stop paying. If the scripts live in an account, they can become unreachable. If they are files on your disk, they are yours whatever happens to the app, and you can back them up with everything else.

Four things to check before installing

Open the App Store listing and look for an In-App Purchases line, which tells you a paid tier exists whatever the price says. Then sort the reviews by most recent rather than most helpful, because a pricing change shows up in the last few months and not in the older reviews that the summary is built from.

Then check whether it asks for an account before it will let you paste a script, and where your scripts end up on disk. If you cannot find them as files, they are in a database or in someone's cloud, and getting them out later is their decision rather than yours.

Promptur

Promptur is free, has no in-app purchases, no account and no analytics. Scripts are plain text and Markdown files that you can open in any editor and back up however you like, and nothing is locked inside the app. The only time it touches the network is when macOS fetches Apple's on-device speech model, once.

It follows your voice rather than scrolling at a fixed speed, and it can be kept out of a screen share. It needs macOS 26 or later. There is more on the Promptur page, on voice following, and on hiding it from a Zoom screen share.