search "free teleprompter" and you get 5 pages of apps that are free to install and not free to use. the cost is real, it is somewhere in the app, and you find it at the worst possible moment: after the take.
this is the checklist. run it on any teleprompter, including this one, before you point a camera at yourself.
1. does the recording come out clean#
install the app, record 10 seconds of yourself, and look at the file. not the preview, the file.
what you are looking for is a watermark in a corner, a bumper on the front or end, or a resolution cap on the free tier. a watermark you can crop is still a watermark that ate your frame. a bumper is a hard cut you have to trim on every single clip forever.
this is the most common paywall in the category and the easiest to test. do it first, because a fail here ends the evaluation.
2. can you get to the words without an account#
open the app cold. can you paste a script and read it, with no sign-in screen, no email, no "create your free account to continue"?
an account is not a feature for a teleprompter. the text is on your device, the reading happens on your device, and nothing needs to leave the room. an account exists so the app can put a subscription behind it later and so someone can email you about it.
if it demands an account before showing you a single word, you are not evaluating a teleprompter, you are evaluating a funnel.
3. is mirror mode free#
mirror mode flips the text left to right so it survives a bounce off a beam-splitter glass and lands the right way round in your eye. it is a transform matrix. it is one line of code.
it is also, in a startling number of apps, the paid feature. the thing that makes a teleprompter a teleprompter rather than a large-print note app.
check it before you buy a rig. a beam-splitter build is worthless if the software behind it charges monthly for the flip, and the mechanics of that setup are covered in the beam splitter teleprompter guide.
4. how do you control the scroll, and does it cost anything#
there are four ways to move the text, and the free tier usually gives you the worst one.
- fixed speed. a slider, set before you start. you match the machine instead of it matching you. workable for a short read, miserable for anything with a pause in it.
- your thumb. drag to scroll. fine if your hands are out of frame, visible if they are not.
- a bluetooth remote. a cheap clicker or page-turner. good, if the app supports one, and the setup is a five-minute job.
- your voice. the app listens and advances the text as you say it, so a pause is a pause and an ad-lib does not desync you.
voice tracking is the one worth checking hardest, because it is the feature most likely to be paywalled and the one that changes how a take feels. open prompter does it on device, and how voice tracking works explains what it is matching against.
5. where does your script live when you close the app#
open the app, add a script, then find that file on your device.
if the answer is "in the app's own library, in a format only this app reads," your scripts are hostage. moving to another tool means retyping or copy-pasting every one of them, which is exactly the friction that keeps people subscribed to software they no longer like.
the better answer is a plain text or markdown file in a folder you chose. write in whatever you like, save into the folder, and the teleprompter reads what is there. that is the workflow described in the file is the handoff, and it is the reason a synced folder beats a proprietary library.
what "open source" adds to the checklist#
open source is not a promise that an app is good. plenty of open source software is abandoned, ugly, or broken.
what it does give you is that the five answers above cannot quietly change. a closed app can add a watermark, add an account wall, and move mirror mode behind a subscription in an update you did not read the notes for. that has happened repeatedly in this category, and the people it happened to had no recourse beyond a one-star review.
with an MIT-licensed app the current version stays licensed the way it was licensed. someone can fork it. and the claims are checkable rather than promised: on-device processing is either in the source or it is not, and the privacy argument rests on that being readable.
open prompter is free and MIT-licensed and it passes all five: no watermark, no account, mirror mode free, voice tracking free and on device, scripts as plain files in a folder you pick. the only money in the picture goes the other way, since keeping an app on the App Store costs $99 a year in Apple Developer Program fees.
run the checklist anyway#
test it on this app. record 10 seconds, check the file, check the flip, check where the script went.
a teleprompter is text that scrolls, flipped left to right. anything that makes you sign in, watermark a take, or retype a script is charging you for something the category already solved.