The file you already wrote
You point Open Prompter at a folder once, in iCloud Drive, an Obsidian vault, Dropbox or anywhere else the Files app can reach, and the script you saved on your Mac shows up on the phone with no paste step and no import step, so no version of your script ever lives only inside the app. Headings render as headings and bold renders as bold, and the scaffolding a script picks up along the way, front matter, footnotes and [B-roll: ...] cues, drops off the screen while the file on disk stays as you wrote it.
The front camera records while you read. Turn on "save next to the script" and the .mov writes to the same folder as the .md, so when you sit down at the Mac, iCloud has already put the take beside the script it came from and you skip the hunt through Photos and the AirDrop dance.
That idea is the product. I wanted a prompter that read the file I had already written, and people who write their scripts in ChatGPT or Claude found the same thing, because the models hand back markdown and the folder picks it up. Open Prompter does not generate scripts and I don't plan for it to, so you draft wherever you draft and the app does the reading.
Why it exists
When I went looking, every teleprompter on the App Store wanted a subscription before it would flip the text for a beam splitter, and most of them wanted the script pasted into their box or uploaded to their cloud first. Mirror mode is the feature that turns a phone into a teleprompter, since the words have to survive a bounce off the glass and land the right way round, and that feature sat behind the paywall. So I built the one I wanted, and it went up on the App Store on April 27, 2026.
Why it is free and MIT-licensed
A teleprompter is text that scrolls, flipped left to right. Open Prompter has no server and no account, and the app makes no network calls of its own, so there is nothing for me to run and nothing to bill you for, and charging rent on scrolling text would mean inventing a cost that isn't there. The one real cost is the $99 a year Apple charges for the developer program, and the buy me a coffee link covers that plus the test hardware.
The source is on GitHub under the MIT license, so if I lost interest, or the app got bought, or someone turned it into a subscription, the version that works today keeps working, you can build it yourself, and someone else can ship it. The license also lets you check the privacy claims instead of trusting them: no analytics, no tracking and no third-party SDKs, and you can confirm that by reading the repo. MIT is permissive, so anyone can take the code, close it and charge for it. I knew that when I picked it, and I chose the license that puts the fewest conditions on the person downloading the app.
How it's built
Open Prompter is a SwiftUI app for iOS 17 and up. Voice tracking uses on-device speech recognition to move the page to the last word you said, so pausing to think holds the scroll and skipping a sentence catches up, and the audio never leaves the phone. The matcher lines your words up against the script with word-level edit distance and phonetic folding, and it favors the spot near where you already are, so a common word like "the" does not throw you to the end of the script. On iOS 26 it can hand recognition to Apple's SpeechAnalyzer with the words of your script fed in as vocabulary, so names and jargon land instead of turning into something that rhymes with them.
On iPhone 17 and newer the front sensor is square, and Open Gate records all of it at 3840 by 3840, so one read gives you a 9:16 for Shorts and a 16:9 for YouTube and you choose the crop in the edit. Tap MARK while you record, or put a heading or a [MARK] cue in the script, and the .mov carries a QuickTime chapter track plus an Adobe XMP marker track, which Premiere Pro reads as native markers on the timeline.
A good share of the app came from outside. The ten-key remote bindings and the rework of how the voice follow chases you arrived as pull requests, and people reporting from iPhones I don't own pinned down the preview rotation bugs. The issue tracker is the whole support process, and it is public.
Who made it
I'm Leland Dutcher, a cinematographer and creative technologist. I spent nearly three seasons as the team photographer for UCF Athletics, through a national championship, and I have worked with ESPN, Meta, PepsiCo and the New Orleans Saints. When I am not shooting I build the tools the work needs, NAS storage systems, remote editing workflows and macOS automation tools, and most of them started on a shoot where the tool I needed did not exist yet.
Open Prompter is one person's project, so mail to hello@openprompter.app comes to me, and I read every one. Bugs and feature requests go on GitHub, where anyone can see them.
Other things I make
- ClipLogger: footage logging for Mac
- Clip Sweeper: clean up Premiere and Resolve projects
- JuiceMount: open-source LucidLink alternative
- TuckBar: hide the Mac menu bar per display
- Sound Cache: save any TikTok sound
- Camera to Anywhere: camera photos home before you are
- Leland Dutcher: my portfolio