VoiceDebrief has no accounts and no billing. You create your own key with OpenRouter — the service that routes work to the AI models — and every transcription is billed to you by them, at their price, with nothing added by us. This page gets you from nothing to a working key.
It is a fair question, and the honest answer has two halves.
This whole product is a static web page. There is no server of ours, no database and no account system — so there is nowhere to hold a balance, and nothing to put a card number into.
Your key, your spend limit, your provider account. You can cap it at a couple of pounds, watch what it actually costs, and revoke it in one click. None of that is true of a credit balance held by us.
We are not in the payment path, so there is no margin to add. What you pay is what OpenRouter charges for the models — which is typically a fraction of a penny per voice note.
Five minutes, and about £2 if you want to be able to run more than the free models. You do not need to install anything.
Go to openrouter.ai and sign up — Google, GitHub or email. It is a routing service, not a model maker: it forwards your request to whichever provider serves the model you asked for.
Under Credits, add the smallest amount you are comfortable with. A pass over a 90-second voice note costs a fraction of a penny for the transcript and debrief; the infographic is the expensive part, because it is an image model. £2 will run a great many voice notes.
You can also skip this and use free models only, but transcription quality on the free tier varies and some free models will not accept audio at all.
Go to openrouter.ai/keys → Create
key. Give it a name you will recognise later — voicedebrief is a
good one, so you know what to revoke if you ever want to.
While creating the key, set a credit limit. This is the single most useful thing on this page: it caps what that key can ever spend, whatever happens. Set it to something you would not mind losing — a pound or two is plenty to start.
A key with a limit cannot cost you more than the limit. A key without one can spend whatever is in your account.
The key starts sk-or- and is shown once — copy it before
you close the dialog. Paste it into the key field on the
app page and press save.
It is stored in your browser's local storage on this device only, and sent to OpenRouter with each request. It is not sent to us, because there is no us to send it to.
Usually a truncated paste — the key is long. Copy it again from OpenRouter, or create a new one. If it was created a moment ago, give it a few seconds.
Either the key hit its credit limit or the account ran out. Both are visible on the OpenRouter keys page, and both are fixed by topping up or raising the limit.
Not every model accepts audio, and free models often do not. The app names the model it used in the debug pane, and the workflow declaration says which one each step asks for.
Still stuck? Everything about this product is public — the issue queue is the place to say so.