Credits & privacy

What's free vs metered

Foxl Notes is built so the door is always open:

• Free, no account needed - opening the app, reading notes, editing, formatting, renaming, exporting, searching, and recording on the default engine.
• Billed by whoever runs the engine - transcription. Amazon bills your own AWS account on the default engine; Deepgram, AssemblyAI, OpenAI or ElevenLabs bill the key you pasted; the on-device engine costs nothing. The one exception is Foxl Relay, metered against Foxl credits and offered only to accounts Foxl has enabled for it.
• Runs on the model provider you supply - AI summaries, titles, coaching reports, live translation and the assistant.

Nothing in Notes asks you to sign in to Foxl. A Foxl account is only needed for the things that go through Foxl's servers: push notifications to your phone when a transcript or summary finishes, and the Foxl Relay engine on accounts that have it.

What each half costs

• Transcription costs whatever your engine charges by the minute of audio - Amazon Transcribe streaming rates on your AWS bill by default, your provider's rates on a pasted key, nothing on device. Only Foxl Relay is metered against Foxl credits, by the second.
• AI summaries, titles, coaching reports, live translation, reply suggestions and the assistant cost whatever the provider you set for Foxl Agent charges for the model you picked, on the length of the transcript. A local model costs nothing. Lighter models are cheaper and faster; heavier ones produce richer output.

If you use Foxl Relay, your balance is under Settings > Account; there is no plan to buy, so it is the signup grant plus the free monthly refill. When any engine refuses to keep transcribing - credits gone, an expired AWS session, a key out of quota - Foxl shows the engine's own reason and stops the recording; no note is filed and the audio is not kept.

How your audio is handled

• Audio is streamed for transcription only while you're recording, and only to the engine you chose.
• Amazon Transcribe (default): the Foxl desktop signs a short-lived session with your own AWS credentials and your device streams the audio straight to AWS. Foxl's servers are not in that path. On the phone, your desktop hands over a one-hour, transcribe-only pass so the phone can sign for itself.
• Deepgram, AssemblyAI, OpenAI, ElevenLabs: your audio goes from your device to your Foxl desktop, which opens the connection to the vendor with your key and passes the audio through. The key is stored encrypted on that computer and is never sent to Foxl.
• On device: the audio never leaves your Mac.
• Foxl Relay: Foxl's relay signs the AWS session on Foxl's own account and counts the seconds; the audio still goes directly from your device to AWS. Foxl never stores your raw audio.
• The transcript, your notes and the recorded audio (so you can play a transcript line back) are kept on the device you recorded on - the desktop app's data folder, the phone app's own storage, or your browser's storage on app.foxl.ai. Notes do not sync between devices; auto-save to a synced folder is the way to carry them (see Exporting & saving).
• Deleting a note removes it and its audio from that device, and signing out of the web app clears the notes kept in that browser.
• When you're signed in, Foxl's relay is told when a transcript, summary or report has finished - the note's title and id, nothing else - so it can push a notification to your phone.
• What the AI sees: the transcript or note text, the Background tab, and My context for AI from Settings go to your model provider. With Use Foxl Agent tools on (the default), an ask can also read your files and run commands under Settings > Tools and your permission rules.

Cost today

Foxl is free and there is no plan to buy. The two halves of Notes are affected differently, because only one of them is model inference:

• Transcription is unaffected. It is a streaming session on the engine you chose, not a model completion, so the default (Amazon Transcribe on your own AWS account) works with no Foxl account at all.
• AI summaries, titles and the assistant run on the provider you set for Foxl Agent, through your desktop - your own key, a local model, or a Claude / ChatGPT subscription. Nothing is sent to foxl.ai for inference. With no provider configured, Settings > Notes > AI features shows a notice with a Model & provider button instead of a model list; on the phone or on app.foxl.ai these features also need your computer reachable over the desktop relay.

See Cost & model access for the ways to supply a model and for what the refusal looks like.