30-second version: I built Replay for a very specific job: recording a sales call without sending a bot into it. It captures Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams from your Mac. Nothing joins the roster. The transcript stays on your machine. I'm the person who makes it. $10 USD once in the U.S., before tax, for two Macs.

If you sell, you've probably had this moment. You're on a first call, and a second name shows up in the participant list: someone's notetaker, waiting to be admitted. The next few minutes go to explaining the tool instead of the product. Otter has described that exact scene on a sales call. On Reddit, people say it more bluntly. In one Teams thread, a client immediately asked who the bot was and why it was recording. In another, someone wrote that clients often pause mid-sentence when "Fireflies Notetaker has joined."

I don't have a dramatic "this lost me a deal" story, and I'm not going to invent one. It's a bad first impression on a call where first impressions matter. So I built a recorder that isn't a guest.

When a bot is actually the right tool

I want to be fair, because this is not "bots are always worse."

If you run a sales team and you need every call in the CRM, with coaching scorecards and a manager reviewing a dozen reps, a Gong or Fireflies-style bot is built for that. That's team-wide sync and coaching at scale. Replay does not do that. There is no Salesforce or HubSpot integration. I looked at my own docs before writing this, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Bots are also fine on internal calls, where everyone already expects a notetaker. The awkwardness people describe is mostly on external calls, especially first ones.

Replay is for a different job: founders doing their own sales, or a rep who wants a private, local copy of a discovery call without adding a participant.

Why "nothing joins" matters on a prospect-hosted call

On a call you host, you can usually admit a bot. On a call the prospect hosts, you often can't.

Microsoft documents that tenants can detect external bots, park them in the lobby, and require an organizer to admit them. Fathom's own Teams setup guide is honest about this: a connected integration is not the same as a successful recording, and org policy, the lobby, or a human-verification check can still stop a notetaker. Zoom has bot protection, and a host can require sign-in, which rejects an unauthenticated bot.

If the prospect's IT has locked that down, you don't get a transcript. You get a bot stuck outside, and sometimes a conversation about it. Replay never tries to enter the meeting. It records the window on your Mac.

The other reason I care about this for sales: the recording, transcript, and notes stay in ordinary files under ~/Movies/Replay Recordings/. They are not uploaded unless you explicitly create a Share Link (a temporary public video for 1 to 12 hours). For a call where a prospect talks about their pipeline, their stack, or their internal mess, that default feels like the respectful one.

What you actually get after the call

Replay records the selected meeting window, the call's audio, and your microphone on separate tracks. Transcript lines start as Me or Them. You can name speakers and fix a line if you need to. Search is local. Click a passage to jump to that moment.

If Apple Intelligence is on, it can draft a summary, decisions, action items, and chapters. Treat those as a first pass, and check names and dates against the recording.

It runs on Apple silicon with macOS 26 or later. One purchase activates two Macs. After activation and a speech-model download, recording and transcription can run offline.

On price: Replay is $10 once in the U.S., before tax, no subscription. Paddle shows the local total at checkout, and tax varies by country. For context only, Replay's pricing page (checked 7 November 2026) put Fireflies Pro at $18/month, or $216 over 12 months, and Fathom Premium at $20/month, or $240, for one seat on monthly billing. Features differ, and both of those services also have free plans. I'm not pretending this is an apples-to-apples feature chart. It's a pay-once Mac app versus a per-seat subscription.

What it doesn't do (please read this)

It's Mac only, and it needs macOS 26.

The video is the call window you selected. On a typical discovery call that's the people, the speaker tiles, whoever is large on screen. It does not automatically capture the prospect's screen share as a separate source. If they're walking through a slide and your selected window is still showing faces, the recording will show faces. In Microsoft Teams, from version 0.2.10, Settings → Recording → "Record what I share in the call" can follow a window or screen you present. That is about what you share, not the prospect's deck.

And this one is more important than any feature: tell the prospect you are recording.

Replay does not announce itself. A bot in the roster is not consent, and the absence of a bot is not a free pass either. Many places require everyone's consent. Your company may already have a rule. Say it at the start. Put a line in the invite if that helps. If they say no, don't record. I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. Follow the law where you and the prospect are, and your own policy.

A practical workflow

Before the call. Activate Replay, grant Screen & System Audio Recording and Microphone, and download the speech model. Do a two-minute test with a colleague. In the invite, mention that you may record for notes, and that you'll ask again at the start.

During. Join Meet, Zoom, or Teams as you normally would. When everyone has agreed, start Replay, pick the call window and your mic, and check both audio meters. Then forget the app and run the call. Nothing extra appears in the roster.

After. Open the recording. Search for the moments that matter: budget, a competitor they named, the date they mentioned, the intro they offered. Copy the exact line into your follow-up email, and paste a short note into your CRM by hand. Replay will not push this into Salesforce or HubSpot for you.

If you already use Claude Code, Cursor, or Claude Desktop, there is one more path, and it's the reason I put this on DEV. Replay can run as a local, read-only MCP server:

claude mcp add --scope user replay -- "/Applications/Replay.app/Contents/MacOS/Replay" --mcp

The tools are list_recordings, search_recordings, get_recording, and get_transcript. They cannot edit or delete anything. I've used prompts like "List the action items from my latest client call" or "What did we decide about pricing? Include the meeting and timestamp." Then I edit the draft and paste it into the email myself.

The catch, which the docs also state: the MCP connection is local, but a cloud assistant receives whatever transcript it reads. Think about that before you send a confidential call to a model.

If you want to try it

Replay is at https://tryreplay.online/. Ten dollars once in the U.S., two Macs, no bot in the waiting room.

If you try it on a real discovery call, look at the video, not only the transcript, and tell the other person first. I'd rather hear that the picture wasn't what you expected than have you find out later.