CastLoom Pro, a desktop app for Windows and macOS from indie developer toolooz.com, launched on Hacker News this week. The core pitch: batch-download podcasts from Apple Podcasts, transcribe them locally using Faster-Whisper, and push the results into Notion or Obsidian — without sending audio to any external server.
Faster-Whisper is an open-source reimplementation of OpenAI's Whisper that runs entirely on-device. Users can optionally route translation through DeepL or OpenAI APIs using their own keys, and export transcripts as SRT, VTT, Markdown, or JSON. A bilingual subtitle mode displays original audio alongside a translation side-by-side in real time — a feature aimed at language learners that subscription competitors haven't specifically addressed.
The pricing model is what separates CastLoom Pro most clearly from the field. Snipd charges $6.99 per month for Premium; Podwise runs $5.90 to $11.90 per month (both figures checked against current pricing pages at publication). Both are mobile-first and cloud-dependent. CastLoom Pro charges a one-time lifetime fee, which breaks even against either subscription somewhere between 12 and 18 months — after which you're simply ahead.
The natural comparison is Obsidian, the local-first note-taking tool that built a devoted following on a free personal license (commercial use costs $50 per user per year). CastLoom Pro is betting on similar demand from knowledge workers who don't want their audio on someone else's server and don't want another monthly charge. That's a real market, but whether it's large enough to sustain ongoing development on one-time sales alone is the real question — Obsidian held up, but it also took years to find its footing. CastLoom Pro's actual advantage isn't Faster-Whisper, which anyone can download; it's the workflow glue sitting on top: bulk transcription queuing, Apple Podcasts batch downloading, and the export pipeline into Notion and Obsidian. A 7-day free trial is available before purchase.