AudioNotes
AudioNotes turns speech into finished text. You record a voice note, upload an audio or video file, or type a note, and the app returns a transcript and a structured version of it: a summary, meeting minutes, an email or a social post. A speech-to-text model, a program that converts recorded speech into written words, makes the transcript; the company names OpenAI's Whisper, and its privacy policy also lists Deepgram and AssemblyAI. A large language model, a program trained on large amounts of text to write and rewrite text, makes the structured version; the privacy policy lists OpenAI and Google Gemini for voice-to-text processing and summarization. Results can go to Notion, Zapier, WhatsApp or a webhook, a web address of the customer's own system that receives each note automatically. The apps run on iPhone, Android, the web and a Mac beta, and the company behind them is 1811 Labs, a product studio in Bengaluru, India.
Vatsal Sanghvi, a BITS Pilani graduate who had worked at Flipkart, founded 1811 Labs in February 2023 and started building AudioNotes in May 2023, two months after OpenAI opened the Whisper API at US$0.006 a minute. In December 2023 it had more than 5,700 registered users and 200 paying customers, at US$99 or US$199 a year. A gaps.com report first published in May 2024 says it made over US$7,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue, the subscription revenue that repeats every month. On 21 August 2024 an Inshorts brief for BuildSchool, a course seller where he was a mentor, said the app makes ₹6 lakh a month. At the August 2024 average of 83.8855 rupees per US dollar, that is about US$7,153 a month, a run rate (the monthly figure times 12) of about US$85,831 a year.
Every money figure on this page is grade C. Both come from the founder's side, one through a course promotion and one through a report that names no source, and no payment processor confirms them. No figure after August 2024 was found. Between December 2023 and July 2025, Google, Apple and OpenAI put recording, transcription and summaries into their own products. The page also shows earlier companies that sold note-taking against a free, larger product, or built voice technology that the large platforms then built themselves.
The numbers, graded
Each row shows the evidence grade and the source numbers from the list at the end of this page. The grades are explained in How Aiolum verifies.
| Fact | Value | Grade | How we know | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue per month, August 2024 | ₹6 lakh (₹600,000) | C | Inshorts brief, 21 August 2024: BuildSchool, a course seller where the founder was a mentor, is reported as "stating that his Audionotes app makes ₹6 lakh/month". The words do not say recurring revenue. A lakh is 100,000 rupees. | [2] |
| The same figure in US dollars | about US$7,153 a month | calc | Calculated: ₹600,000 divided by 83.8855 rupees per US dollar, the average of the Federal Reserve's 22 daily rates for August 2024. | [2, 3] |
| Run rate from the August 2024 figure | about US$85,831 a year | calc | Calculated: US$7,152.61 times 12. This is the headline number on this page. | [2, 3] |
| Monthly recurring revenue reported by gaps.com | over US$7,000 | C | gaps.com report, first published 6 May 2024 and updated 2 May 2025. It says "now" without a date and names no source. No 2024 copy is in the Wayback Machine, so the month of this figure is not verified. | [1] |
| Users, December 2023 | more than 5,700 registered users, 200 paying customers | C | gaps.com, as of December 2023. | [1] |
| Recurring revenue that 200 yearly customers would give | about US$1,650 to US$3,317 a month | calc | Calculated: 200 times US$99 or US$199, divided by 12. It assumes every paying customer was on a yearly plan. So the recurring revenue of over US$7,000 a month was reached after December 2023. | [1] |
| Annual revenue recorded by Latka, November 2023 | US$17,000 | C | Latka marks the source as "not recorded". That is about US$1,417 a month (calculated: divided by 12), in line with the December 2023 customer count. | [7] |
| Total from all the founder's AI products, August 2024 | more than ₹80 lakh (₹8,000,000) in 18 months, about US$95,368 | C | Inshorts headline. This total is not AudioNotes alone: the same brief says that Podnotes, another of his products, made ₹40 lakh in 10 months. Conversion at the August 2024 rate (calculated). | [2, 3] |
| Users, October 2026 | 200,000+ users and over 1 million notes | C | The company's about page. The number of paying users is not stated. | [4] |
| Team, November 2023 | 1 person | C | Latka: "1 person lists AudioNotes as their employer on LinkedIn (November 2023)." The App Store seller is the founder as an individual. | [7, 9] |
| Team of the parent studio, October 2026 | 5 people, the founder among them | C | 1811 Labs calls itself "A small team of problem solvers and tinkerers in Bengaluru, India" and names Claude Code and Codex as its "AI crew". The five also build the studio's other products. | [11] |
| Outside funding | none found | C | Latka records no funding, and no source read for this page mentions a round. | [7] |
| App stores, October 2026 | App Store (US): 4.8 from 96 ratings. Google Play: 4.1 from 404 reviews, 10K+ downloads | B | Shown by Apple and Google. The Android app was updated on 6 October 2026. | [9, 10] |
| Price of the top yearly plan | US$199 in the December 2023 report, US$129.99 in October 2026 | C | 34.7% lower (calculated). The 2026 page also has a free plan with unlimited voice notes of up to 1 minute each. | [1, 5] |
| Operating company | 1811 Labs, Bengaluru, India | C | The about page says "Built by 1811 Labs". The terms are governed by the laws of India, with the courts in Bengaluru, Karnataka. The founder's profile lists him as founder of 1811 Labs since February 2023. | [4, 6, 8] |
| Time from the start of building to the August 2024 figure | 15 months | calc | Calculated: May 2023 to August 2024. | [2, 4] |
How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement from the founder's side, the company's own pages, or a third party that does not name its source. Grade B values are shown by the app stores. A "calc" value was computed on this page from the rows above it. No revenue value is grade A or B.
| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 | 0 | voice notes of up to 1 minute each; unlimited text notes |
| Pro | 10.83 | 29.99 | US$129.99 billed yearly; recordings up to 6 hours, files up to 500 MB |
| Enterprise | custom | custom | teams of 5 or more |
The yearly Pro plan is US$129.99, which the page shows as a 64% saving against US$29.99 a month (63.9%, calculated). The monthly price was read from the page's embedded data, because the monthly view loads by script. The App Store lists more in-app prices, including weekly plans from US$3.99 to US$12.99 and other yearly prices of US$89.99 and US$99.99. In December 2023 gaps.com reported US$99 a year for the personal plan and US$199 a year for the pro plan, with lifetime plans at double. The company gives no refunds for paid plans.
The timeline
From a new domain in May 2023 to about US$7,000 a month in August 2024, in 15 months, and what the large platforms shipped around it. Each entry carries its grade.
- February 2023CVatsal Sanghvi founds 1811 Labs, after roles at Entrepreneur First, Flipkart and Omidyar Network India, according to his profile. [8]
- 1 March 2023COpenAI opens its Whisper speech-to-text model through the API at US$0.006 a minute. [14]
- 3 May 2023BFirst capture of audionotes.app in the Wayback Machine. The company says it started building AudioNotes that month. [12, 4]
- After August 2023CA redesign after customer feedback, with new features. gaps.com links it to a rise in income. [1]
- November 2023CLatka records US$17,000 in annual revenue and 1 person on LinkedIn. [7]
- 6 December 2023CGoogle's Recorder app on the Pixel 8 Pro gets summaries from Gemini Nano, a model that runs on the phone. [19]
- December 2023CMore than 5,700 registered users and 200 paying customers, at US$99 or US$199 a year. [1]
- 6 May 2024Cgaps.com publishes a report that lists AudioNotes at over US$7,000 a month in recurring revenue. [1]
- 10 June 2024CApple announces that its Notes and Phone apps can record, transcribe and summarize audio. [18]
- 21 August 2024CAn Inshorts brief for BuildSchool says that the app makes ₹6 lakh a month, about US$7,153. [2, 3]
- 20 March 2025COpenAI releases gpt-4o-transcribe and gpt-4o-mini-transcribe, with lower word error rates than Whisper. [15]
- 16 July 2025CChatGPT's record mode reaches Plus users in the macOS app, for team meetings or voice notes. [16]
- October 2026C200,000+ users and Pro at US$29.99 a month or US$129.99 a year. The parent studio lists five people. [4, 5, 11]
Why it worked
Four causes, in the order they mattered. Each one is a reusable lesson.
Built on a model that had just become cheap
The company's own account starts with Whisper: "When OpenAI released Whisper, transcription suddenly became dramatically better, and almost overnight, commoditized." The Whisper API cost US$0.006 a minute from 1 March 2023, which is US$0.36 for an hour of audio (calculated). AudioNotes started two months later, so the hardest part, speech recognition, was rented by the minute instead of built.
Sell the step after the transcript
The app does not stop at the words. It turns a recording or a note into a summary, meeting minutes, an email or a social post, in a style and length that the user chooses. The Pro plan adds custom prompts and chat with your notes.
Send the result where people work
Links to Zapier, Notion and WhatsApp were part of the product by the 2024 report. In 2026 the Pro plan includes Notion, Zapier and webhooks, and the site offers a WhatsApp bot.
Yearly plans
In 2023 the plans were US$99 and US$199 a year, with lifetime plans at double. In 2026 the yearly Pro plan is US$129.99 against US$29.99 a month, and the page shows the yearly plan as a 64% saving.
How it was built
These details come from the company's own pages and files (grade C) and from the app stores (grade B). [5, 25, 26, 22, 21, 9, 23, 11]
- Speech-to-text: the pricing page names "OpenAI's Whisper and other audio models". The privacy policy lists Deepgram and AssemblyAI "for speech-to-text transcription", and OpenAI and Google Gemini "for AI-based voice-to-text processing and summarization".
- Text generation: "we use OpenAI's models to power our AI features", with OpenAI's data training turned off for its content, according to the same page.
- Payments: Stripe on the web and the app stores of Apple and Google, according to the privacy and refund policies.
- The affiliate program runs on Lemon Squeezy, which gives each affiliate a tracked link; commissions are paid by PayPal.
- The website is built with Next.js: its robots.txt file refers to the /_next/static/ folder and to next.config.mjs.
- Apps for iPhone, Android, the web and a Mac beta. The iPhone app is sold under the founder's own name, with in-app plans from US$3.99 a week to US$129.99 a year.
- The home page loads Google's analytics tag, gtag.js.
- The company scores summary quality on its comparison pages with GPT-4o as the judge: a language model that rates each summary against a fixed rubric.
- In 2026 the parent studio says that Claude Code "Writes all the code" and that Codex "Plans everything. Tests everything."
Tools named in the sources
Each one opens its page in the Tools tab, with every story that uses it.
The dead that came before
Four companies in the Loot Drop database sold note-taking against a free, larger product, or built voice technology that the large platforms then built themselves. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.
Transpose
The promiseFirst launched as KustomNote: a more flexible Evernote, later for business teams.
Why it diedIt could not give Evernote users a reason to switch, and it charged for plans without outside money to compete with a larger, established product.
Springpad
The promiseSave and organize articles, recipes and notes in one place, as an Evernote competitor.
Why it diedUsers valued the free product, but premium features and business plans did not sell, and development fell behind Evernote.
VocalIQ
The promiseVoice interfaces that learn from context, for assistants and cars.
Why it diedApple, Google and Amazon, with more money, moved faster with their own voice technology. Apple bought it in 2015, which ended it as an independent company.
Tellme
The promiseInformation and transactions by voice over the phone, with speech recognition.
Why it diedSmartphones moved people to apps with screens, and Google and Amazon built their own AI voice products.
What changed
Transpose and Springpad sold note-taking against Evernote, a larger product that people already used for free, and could not give users a reason to pay or to switch. VocalIQ and Tellme built voice technology and lost to Apple, Google and Amazon, which built their own. AudioNotes carries both risks at once: it is a paid notes app, and Apple, Google and OpenAI now record, transcribe and summarize inside their own products.
Two things differ. The costly part, speech recognition, is now rented from a model provider by the minute, so one person could start in 2023 without outside money, while VocalIQ raised US$2 million and Tellme US$238 million to build their own voice systems. And the product sells the steps after the transcript: a finished summary, minutes, an email or a post, sent on to Notion, Zapier, webhooks or WhatsApp. The open question for AudioNotes is whether those steps stay worth paying for while the built-in tools improve.
Can one person copy it now?
The method, yes. The same product, no.
In May 2023 a clean transcript with a summary was new for most people, and Whisper had just made it cheap. In 2026 Apple, Google and OpenAI include recording, transcription and summaries in their own products, and Otter gives 300 minutes a month for free. The method still works for a narrower user, where a fixed output format matters more than the transcript.
Where it is still open: Voice-to-document tools for one kind of user with a fixed output, such as medical, sales or lecture notes, where a general summary is not enough.
- 1When a model becomes cheap through an API, build a product around it within weeks and charge from the start.
- 2Turn the model's raw output into a finished document that a person needs: minutes, an email, a post.
- 3Send the result to the tools where the user already works, such as Notion, Zapier or WhatsApp.
- 4Sell yearly plans and show the saving against the monthly price.
What to watch
The risks are the mirror image of the causes above.
Second-hand figures from the founder's side
No payment processor confirms either revenue figure. The ₹6 lakh figure is a course seller's claim, relayed in a short news brief. The gaps.com figure has no named source and no exact month. The two agree, about US$7,000 a month, but neither is independent.
A course promotion as a source
The Inshorts brief promotes BuildSchool, where the founder was a mentor, and its link leads to a GrowthSchool course application form, not to an article. A course seller has a reason to show high incomes for its mentors. The brief's ₹80 lakh headline is the total of several products over 18 months, not AudioNotes alone.
No figure after August 2024
No revenue figure from 2025 or 2026 was found, so the trend is unknown. Users grew to 200,000+ by 2026, but the number of paying users is not given, and the top yearly price fell from US$199 to US$129.99.
The platforms ship the same feature
Google added summaries to the Recorder app on the Pixel 8 Pro on 6 December 2023. Apple announced on 10 June 2024 that Notes and Phone can "record, transcribe, and summarize audio". OpenAI gave ChatGPT Plus users a record mode on macOS on 16 July 2025 for "team meetings or voice notes". These come with a phone or a subscription that many users already have, and Otter's free Basic plan includes 300 transcription minutes a month.
Cheaper and better speech-to-text for everyone
The transcript is no longer scarce. Whisper cost US$0.006 a minute in 2023, and in March 2025 OpenAI released two newer transcription models with a lower word error rate, the share of words that a model gets wrong. Every competitor gets the same models on the same day, so users compare the price of the app. AudioNotes added a free plan and cut its top yearly price by 34.7% between the 2023 report and 2026.
Dependence on model providers
The pricing page says that OpenAI's models power the AI features, and the privacy policy lists four providers: OpenAI and Google Gemini for processing and summaries, Deepgram and AssemblyAI for transcription. Several providers make a switch possible when one raises its price or fails, but the company owns none of the models, and a change at any of them reaches every user.
One founder's time, several products
Latka counted one person in November 2023. By 2026 the founder runs a studio of five people that also builds HomeDesignAI, UGC Pulse and marketing agents, and that sells advice including "TikTok UGC at scale". How much of the team's time goes to AudioNotes is not known.
Sources
The grade next to each source is the best grade that the source can support. "Read in full" means that the text of the page was downloaded and the numbers were checked in it.
- C gaps.com: AI Content Report, 17 Startups Generating $1.5M in MRR, first published 6 May 2024, updated 2 May 2025Read the section on AudioNotes (number 4). The page names no source for its figures, and no 2024 copy is in the Wayback Machine, so the month of the US$7,000 figure is not verified.
- C Inshorts, 21 August 2024: Vatsal has built AI products to make ₹80L+ in 18 months: BuildSchoolRead in full (a 60-word brief). It reports a claim by BuildSchool, a course seller; it is a promotion, not reporting. Source for the ₹6 lakh a month and the ₹80 lakh total.
- A Federal Reserve Board, H.10 historical rates: India, rupees per US dollarDownloaded the daily table and averaged the 22 business days of August 2024 with python3: 83.8855. Used only for the conversion; it says nothing about AudioNotes.
- C AudioNotes: About, read 16 October 2026Read in full. Source for the May 2023 start, the Whisper account, the 200,000+ users and the 1811 Labs name.
- C AudioNotes: Plans and Pricing, read 16 October 2026Read in full. The monthly price (US$29.99) was read from the page's embedded data because the monthly view loads by script. Source for the FAQ on Whisper and OpenAI.
- C AudioNotes: Terms of ServiceRead the section on governing law and jurisdiction.
- C Latka company page: AudioNotes revenueRead in full. A third-party record: it marks the revenue source as not recorded and counts profiles on LinkedIn.
- C Peerlist: Resume of Vatsal SanghviRead in full. The founder's own profile: founder of 1811 Labs since February 2023, and his earlier roles.
- B Apple App Store listing (US): Audionotes: Audio Notes AI, read 16 October 2026Read in full. The seller, the ratings and the in-app price list are shown by Apple; the description is the developer's.
- B Google Play listing: Audionotes: AI Notes & Minutes, read 16 October 2026Read in full. The developer name, download range, reviews and update date are shown by Google.
- C 1811 Labs, the parent studio, read 16 October 2026Read in full. The studio's own description of its team, products and services.
- B Internet Archive Wayback Machine: first captures of audionotes.appRead the capture list: the first capture is from 3 May 2023. The captured page shows only the name, so it does not prove a working product on that day.
- C Internet Archive copy of link.buildschool.net/inshorts, captured 24 October 2025Read in full. The link in the Inshorts brief redirects to a GrowthSchool course application form; no BuildSchool article with the figure was found, and buildschool.net no longer resolves.
- C OpenAI, 1 March 2023: Introducing ChatGPT and Whisper APIsRead the section on the Whisper API and its price.
- C OpenAI, 20 March 2025: Introducing next-generation audio models in the APIRead the section on the new speech-to-text models.
- C OpenAI Help Center: ChatGPT release notesRead the entry of 16 July 2025 on record mode.
- C OpenAI Help Center: ChatGPT Record, read 16 October 2026Read the overview, which lists the plans that have record mode.
- C Apple Newsroom, 10 June 2024: Introducing Apple Intelligence for iPhone, iPad, and MacRead the section on recording, transcription and summaries in Notes and Phone.
- C Google, 6 December 2023: Pixel December feature dropRead the section on Summarize in Recorder.
- C Otter.ai pricing, read 16 October 2026Read the free Basic plan.
- C AudioNotes robots.txt, read 16 October 2026Read in full. Its comments, dated 5 May 2026 and 12 September 2026, describe search-engine work, and its paths show a Next.js site.
- C AudioNotes: Affiliate programRead the offer: 30% commission when a referred user upgrades.
- C AudioNotes: Testing MethodologyRead the section on how summary quality is scored.
- C Loot Drop database export, 1,749 failed startupsLocal export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.
- C AudioNotes: Privacy Policy, read 16 October 2026Read in full. Source for the list of model providers (OpenAI, Google Gemini, Deepgram, AssemblyAI) and the payment processors.
- C AudioNotes: Refund Policy, read 16 October 2026Read in full. Source for the sales channels: Apple App Store, Google Play and Stripe.