a few honest things became clear after shipping open prompter and listening to the people who use it.
none of it came from a strategy doc. it came from reading what people wrote back, watching where they got excited, and noticing what they didn't have to be told. here's what stuck.
the category was tired and people knew it#
i didn't set out to make a statement about teleprompter apps. i just wanted one that read the file i already wrote. but the more i looked, the clearer the pattern got.
most teleprompter apps want a subscription to turn on mirror mode. a lot of them want your script pasted into a box, or uploaded to their cloud first. the good features sit behind a "Pro" wall that gets taller the more serious you are about the work.
what surprised me is how many people felt the same way before i said a word. open prompter is free, MIT-licensed, and reads markdown directly. people found it and the relief was the first thing they mentioned. not a feature. the relief. the bar in this category had been low for long enough that "no subscription, no paste step" read as a feature on its own.
that taught me something. the staleness wasn't a gap in the market i discovered. people were already annoyed. they were waiting for somewhere to go.
simple markdown formatting won people over fast#
this one i underestimated.
open prompter reads .md files straight from a folder you pick once. headings, bold, italic, bullets, numbered lists, blockquotes. it renders the structure on screen and strips the scaffolding at display time, frontmatter and footnotes and [B-roll: ...] cues, without ever touching your file.
i expected people to like this. i didn't expect it to be the thing they kept bringing up. the reaction wasn't "nice formatting options." it was closer to "wait, the file i already wrote works as-is."
that's the whole point, and it took users saying it back to me to see how much it mattered. there's no import step. no copy-paste into a proprietary box. the markdown you write for everything else is the markdown the prompter reads. a heading is a section. bold is emphasis you can see while reading. nobody had to learn a format. they already knew it.
people love that it's llm-native, and we stay out of the lane#
a lot of people draft scripts with ChatGPT or Claude now. they write in markdown because that's what the models hand back. then they drop the file in their folder and open prompter reads it.
this works because we do NOT generate scripts in the app. that's deliberate, and it's worth saying why.
the moment an app tries to be your writing tool too, it has opinions. it wants your text in its container. it wants you drafting inside it. open prompter does the opposite. it assumes you already have a way you like to write, whether that's an editor, a vault, or a chat with a model, and it reads the result. you draft wherever you draft. you deliver here.
people noticed that boundary and liked it. i wrote more about the workflow in draft with ChatGPT or Claude, deliver with open prompter, but the short version is this. staying out of the scriptwriting lane is the feature. it keeps your file yours.
the choice to see or not see the camera mattered more than i thought#
most teleprompter apps put the camera feed behind your text. full frame, always on, a wall of moving words over a live preview of your own face.
i think that's backwards. it's exactly where the camera is most distracting, and you don't get a choice about it.
open prompter does it differently. the camera-style chip cycles off, then PiP, then off again. PiP is a small front-camera tile you can drag anywhere and place near the lens, so your eye-line stays close. tap it to expand to a full-screen "how do i look" check, minimize to collapse. or turn it off entirely and read in peace.
the surprise was that the toggle was the part people cared about, not either setting on its own. some people want a small tile to keep their framing honest. some people find any preview distracting and want a clean wall of text. both are right. the win was letting each person pick instead of deciding for them. i dug into the tradeoff in eye contact: PiP vs camera-behind-text.
it's a small thing on paper. a chip with three states. but it's the difference between a tool that works the way you do and one that works the way it was built.
where this points#
i'm not going to fake a roadmap here. but the themes line up in a direction.
every one of these is about getting out of your way. read the file you wrote. use the format you know. draft with whatever you draft with. see the camera or don't. the through-line isn't a feature list. it's a posture. the tool should assume you have a workflow already and fit into it, instead of asking you to adopt a new one.
that's the lens i'll keep building through. less app, more pass-through. the script stays yours, the file stays on your device, and the prompter does the reading part well.
if you use open prompter and something feels off, or there's a workflow it should fit and doesn't, tell me. that's how all of this got found in the first place. email hello@openprompter.app. it's a free app made by one person, and the feedback is most of the map.