TapeACall is about to get a lot more expensive

The cost of TapeACall, the occasionally glitchy app many reporters use to record their interviews, will increase significantly in less than a month. I discovered this thanks to a pop-up notification when I opened the app, which alerted me that my annual subscription would increase from $29.99 to $79.99 per year on April 16th.

The price increase appears to be a result of new ownership. In January, IAC sold its Mosaic Group mobile apps — which includes TapeACall, editing app PDF Hero, and spam-blocking app Robokiller — to the Italian technology company Bending Spoons. Per Bloomberg, all of Mosaic’s 330 employees were laid off as part of the deal.

Bending Spoons spokesperson Christy Keenan told The Verge in an email that the price of an annual TapeACall subscription with unlimited recordings is actually changing from $59.99 to $79.99 — the $29.99 rate I was getting “was discontinued quite some time ago by the previous ownership.” Keenan added that some users may “experience slightly different prices as we test configurations.”

“With this product, the short-term focus is on improving stability,” Keenan added. “Longer-term, we intend to leverage our AI expertise to improve the transcription feature, among other improvements.”

Some journalists considered TapeACall impossibly glitchy but affordable enough to justify paying for it anyway. “Once I had a call with a multi millionaire pro athlete and TapeACall failed,” sports journalist Bradford William Davis told me. “But at least the app was cheap. I guarantee it won’t work three times better.”

Others jumped ship a long time ago and are now encouraging their colleagues to do the same. “I’ve used TapeACall and similar apps in the past, but sporadic software issues (and the occasional lost recording) ultimately led me to pivot to a physical recorder,” said Paris Martineau, an investigative journalist at The Information. Martineau now uses a Philips audio recorder equipped with a pickup mic that lets her record calls while wearing headphones. 

“I’ve been using this setup for the last four years and haven’t lost a call yet!” she said. And unlike TapeACall and other apps, the recorder is a one-time expense.