TellyPrompter's free tier is the whole prompter, used without an account: all three scroll modes including voice-following, 34 languages, mirror mode, the script library, and in-app recording with no watermark. "Free with no sign-up" usually means a trial wearing a disguise — a watermark, a script limit, a nag towards the upgrade — so this piece lays out exactly what the free tier includes, what the paid tier actually adds, and the honest limits that apply to everyone, so you can judge the design rather than take the word for it.
Free means the prompter
Here's the complete list of what works with no account and no payment, because the list is the claim:
- All three scroll modes — voice-following (the script tracks the word you're actually saying, through pauses, ad-libs and backtracking), sound-level, and constant scroll. The voice-following mode is the reason the product exists, and it is not held back.
- 34 languages, left-to-right and right-to-left, with automatic detection — and OpenDyslexic as a first-class script face, with the same size range as the default.
- Mirror mode and rotation for beam-splitter rigs and portrait-locked phones, plus the full set of display controls: typography, spacing, contrast, active-line position.
- In-app recording, unwatermarked. A take is one press; the file is yours, clean. Nothing about the free tier writes on your video.
- The script library, with tags, stored on your device.
- Import and export. Google Docs import, .docx/.txt/.md upload — and export of every script, in full, on every tier.
- Voice commands and the take tools — "Telly, stop", "Telly, again", stumble markers, the post-take report, measured read-time, and script-accurate SRT/VTT caption export.
- Offline use as an installable app, after one online visit.
The pattern worth noticing: everything on the path from pasting a script to a finished take is in the free tier. What's paid sits beside that path, not across it.
No account on the path
The second half of the claim is the sign-up, and the design here is strict: there is no account on the path from paste to running script. You arrive, you paste, you read. No email gate, no "create a free account to save", no trial clock.
The library is why this works without a catch. Your scripts live in your browser's local storage, on your device — they don't need an account because they were never on a server. The account exists only for people who choose the paid tier, and the one place in the whole app that mentions a price is the account dialog, behind a button on the setup screen. If you never open it, the product never brings it up.
Why build it this way, when every growth playbook says capture the email first? Because the product's own positioning depends on it. A prompter you can hand to a nervous stranger and have running in a minute is a different product from one that opens with a form, and "free with no account" is only a durable claim if the free thing is complete. A hollowed-out free tier would make the sentence marketing; a complete one makes it a description.
What Pro adds, and who it's for
The paid tier is one thing, done properly: an unlimited script library that syncs across your devices.
Sign in, and your scripts live in the cloud as well as on the device — write on the laptop, shoot from the phone, and the library is the same library in both places. The free tier's local storage is per-device by nature; sync is what removes that boundary.
Who actually needs it: someone producing regularly across more than one device, or with a back catalogue of scripts they want kept without thinking about it. A weekly batch-shooter moving between a writing machine and a rig phone is the obvious case. Someone who records occasionally, on one device, plausibly never needs it — and the free tier is not engineered to change their mind.
Pro is £7 a month, £40 a year, or £99 once. That's the only mention of money you'll find in this article, and near enough the only one in the product.
Export shipped before sync, on purpose
One design decision says more about the tier structure than any feature list: export is free, on every tier, for every script — and it shipped before the synced library did.
The reasoning is simple to state: the way out has to be visible before the way in. If your scripts can leave at any time, in full, without payment, then the paid tier has to earn its keep by being useful rather than by holding your work hostage. Lapsing a subscription doesn't strand anything — your scripts remain readable and exportable; what stops is the ongoing sync. The tier boundary is drawn around convenience, not around access to your own writing.
It's worth checking any tool you depend on against this question, whatever you decide about this one: if you stopped paying tomorrow, what happens to the work you've already put in?
The honest limits
These apply to everyone, free and paid, and they're stated here because a piece about what you give up should include the things nobody's tier removes:
- Firefox has no voice-following. Voice mode is built on the browser's speech recognition, and Firefox doesn't implement the API. Everything else works there, and the constant and sound-level modes still scroll — the product degrades rather than blocking — but the listening mode needs a browser that can listen.
- Recognition quality is the browser's, not ours. Speech recognition runs on the device and the audio is never uploaded — and the engine doing it belongs to your browser, so accuracy varies by platform, language and microphone, and no setting in the app can tune it. The two-minute test — paste a real script, read a paragraph — beats any promise.
- The local library has a cap. On the free tier, scripts you haven't tagged are kept up to ten; when an eleventh arrives, the oldest untagged one is evicted from that device. Tagging a script marks it as a keeper, and tagged scripts aren't evicted — with a generous overall ceiling as a backstop so local storage can't silently fill. Anything you care about: tag it, or export it, both free.
None of these is a hook towards the paid tier — Pro inherits the same browser, the same recognition and the same honesty. They're just the true edges of the product.
What you give up, then
Read the lists again and the answer is short. Using TellyPrompter free, without an account, you give up cross-device sync and the unlimited cloud library. You keep the entire prompter: every scroll mode, every language, the rig features, recording without a watermark, your library on your device, and a full exit through export at any time.
Whether that trade suits you depends on how you work, and the honest way to find out costs nothing and asks for no email: paste a real script, stand at your mark, and take a take. The product's bet is that the take is what convinces — and if it does, and you happen to make videos about camera gear for a living, the affiliate programme exists for exactly that conversation.