Locked down, ahead of time
The short version: we rebuilt the security of everything that runs Transcript LOL from first principles — not because anything went wrong, but because we'd rather do it before it ever has to matter. Plus: a new way to earn free credits, and folders on mobile.
From a castle with many doors to a sealed dome 🔒
Your recordings and transcripts are some of the most personal data you trust us with. To be clear up front: there was no incident, and there's nothing you need to do. This is us acting in advance, out of caution.
AI agents are getting really good at finding exploits nobody knew existed. That makes the old way of defending a service — patch every door, add another lock, hope you got them all — a losing game. So we went back to first principles.
Before, our infrastructure was like a castle: lots of doors, each with its own lock. Every database, queue and server had a door facing the internet, and every one of them was something we had to defend.
Now, everything sits under one sealed dome. Our web servers, databases, job queues and the GPU machines that transcribe your audio live on a private, encrypted network with no public ports at all. There's nothing on the outside to scan, probe or brute-force — attackers simply have nothing to connect to.
The only way in is a single tunnel through Cloudflare — a multi-billion-dollar company whose entire business is guarding the front door of the internet. Instead of us defending dozens of doors, the one that remains is defended by the people who do this best.
Inside the dome, we tightened things up too:
Secrets in a vault, not on servers. Passwords and API keys live in an encrypted vault. The GPU machines we spin up on demand no longer carry them at all — each gets short-lived, single-use credentials when it starts, which expire on their own.
Least-privilege access. Each service signs in with its own account that can only touch what it needs — nothing shares a master login.
Less to defend. We retired an old email platform, an unused GPU provider and a monitoring pipeline we no longer needed. Fewer moving parts, fewer places for anything to go wrong.
You won't notice any of this day to day — that's the point. Transcription runs exactly as before.
Earn free credits 🪙
There's a new Get Free Credits page in your account menu. Help spread the word about Transcript LOL and we'll top up your account:
1,000 credits — add a backlink to transcript.lol on your website, or post a video tutorial or review
500 credits — leave an honest review on G2
200 credits — credit us in your podcast show notes (per episode, up to 5), or review our Chrome extension
100 credits — post about Transcript LOL on social media (per platform)
Click Claim, paste a link as proof, and we'll verify it and add the credits to your account.
Folders on mobile 📁
The mobile app now lets you browse your recordings by folder, just like the web dashboard. Your home screen shows your top-level folders followed by unfiled recordings, and tapping a folder opens its subfolders and recordings.
Smaller improvements
Mobile: your full recording library now loads — previously the app only showed your newest 100 recordings.
Faster capacity: when our usual GPUs are busy, we now fall back to additional GPU types and regions, so transcriptions keep moving during busy spells.
Changelog popups: you'll now actually see announcements like this one in the help widget when you're signed in.
Welcome emails: fixed an issue where some new accounts — especially Google sign-ups — missed their getting-started emails.
That's the lot. Tell me what you want us to improve next.
Praveen