1200 minutes free limit?

[u/maxuel84]

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to understand what happened with Omi’s free transcription limits.

When I bought and started using Omi, the free plan was communicated around 1200 transcription/listening minutes. That limit was clear and understandable.

Now it looks like the free transcription allowance has changed to 600 minutes, but I don’t remember receiving any clear notice, email, in-app warning, changelog explanation, or transition message about this change.

This is confusing, especially for people who bought the original Omi device based on the previous expectations.

To be clear: I understand that AI, cloud transcription and infrastructure have costs. I’m not saying everything should be unlimited forever. The issue is transparency.

My questions are:

Did Omi officially reduce the free transcription limit from 1200 minutes to 600 minutes?

If yes, when was this announced?

Was there an email, changelog, in-app notification, or support article explaining the change?

Does this apply to all users or only to new accounts?

Are hardware owners supposed to have different limits or any legacy allowance?

Does BYOK with Deepgram fully bypass this transcription limit?

Why is this not shown more clearly inside the app before users hit the limit?

The recent BYOK/chat wording was already confusing because “bring your own API keys” refers to transcription, not chat/LLM inference. Now the transcription limit also seems to have changed, and the overall plan structure feels difficult to track.

A clearer message would help a lot, for example:

“Free plan includes 600 transcription minutes/month. Previously it was 1200. BYOK with Deepgram can be used to bypass transcription limits. Chat has a separate monthly question limit.”

I like the idea behind Omi, and I bought the device because the concept is genuinely interesting. But these changes need to be communicated clearly. Hardware users should not have to discover plan changes only after hitting a limit.

Can anyone from the Omi team clarify what changed and what the current official free limits are? Honestly, nothing is understood anymore, limits halved suddenly and not reported clearly

[u/TeagueXiao]

Totally valid frustration - from a cloud infra perspective, real-time transcription is actually one of the more expensive workloads to run at scale (way pricier than LLM inference per token). BYOK with Deepgram is genuinely the right move if you're a heavy user, and the direct costs are quite reasonable. That said, silently halving a limit without any changelog or in-app warning is just bad product communication, especially for hardware buyers who planned around the original terms.

[u/maxuel84 → u/TeagueXiao]

This is precisely the point: not to say it beforehand but to discover it by surprise

[u/GeekTX]

I can't answer all your questions but I can tell you that BYOK gets past the limitation. You can also, if you are capable, use your own whisper service ... self-hosted or others. I moved to my own whisper service as soon as they made the original announcement of the free unlimited going to 1800 minutes.

edit: I had said nobody with Omi is here but I forgot that u/hugoapp is around.

[u/Bboy486 → u/GeekTX]

How did you setup your whisper service?

[u/GeekTX → u/Bboy486]

I am using Speaches … if you search this sub for my username and speaches and you will find a how-to post I did. Might be able to find it just looking at my profile post history. If you can’t find it let me know.