Avocado: the free tier that passes all five checks
Avocado is a native Mac teleprompter with a permanent free tier: no card, no account, no expiry, no watermark. Run it against the checklist above and it clears every line — no length cap on constant-speed scrolling, no locked scroll speed, nothing stamped on your video, no account, and it's excluded from screen shares at the OS level. What's included is unlimited constant-speed scrolling at whatever words-per-minute you set, notch and floating modes, screen-share invisibility, the Focus Guide, Script Markers, tags and search, PowerPoint import, mirror text and session receipts. Voice-activated scrolling is Pro, with three full-Pro sessions every week on the free tier.
That's more than any free app on this page gives you, and it sits inside the most capable teleprompter on the Mac. Avocado is the only one an AI assistant can write into — Claude, Cursor or Codex edit scripts directly in your library through its MCP server. It drives five synchronised displays, hands control to an operator with Director Mode, and keeps rehearsal history run over run. Version 3.0 brought Liquid Glass across the prompter, toolbar and editor, and the public changelog shows updates most weeks. Those are Pro, and they're the parts that start mattering once you're doing this weekly.
That's the difference between a free app and a free tier worth having. A free app is as far as it goes; a good free tier is a starting point. Start on Avocado's, and the day you need voice scrolling on every take, a second operator or a synced rig, you switch it on instead of starting over somewhere else. The full 2026 comparison puts it beside every paid option too.
Browser prompters: free, instant, and visible to everyone
If you need a prompter in the next thirty seconds on any machine, a browser tool works. Ours is free: the Avocado online teleprompter runs in any browser with no account and no watermark, sets its speed in words per minute, mirrors for glass, and keeps your script on your device rather than a server. It also comes with free practice scripts and a speech length calculator. CuePrompter is also free with no paid tier and no account, with scroll speed, mirror mode and a few colour themes, and no voice scrolling. FluidPrompter has a free plan with no login, aimed at real hardware: synchronised across any number of screens, true mirroring, and support for X-Keys, AirTurn, stream decks and foot pedals. EasyPrompter works online and offline and can split operator and talent across two displays.
They all share one structural catch, and it's the thing to understand before you pick one: a browser prompter is a visible window on your screen. Share your screen, record your desktop, or join a call with screen sharing on, and your script is right there in the recording. None of them can use the operating-system capture-exclusion flag that native apps rely on. For recording to camera, that's fine. For a live call or a screen recording, it's the whole ballgame.
Speakflow is the most polished of the web tools and the one closest to a real product, but its free tier is the narrowest here: prompter and auto-scroll, limited voice-activated "Flow," seven days of script history, no recording, and an account required. Plus is $15/month billed yearly.
Free Mac apps: smaller, but genuinely free
On a Mac the picture is better, because several native apps are free outright and native apps can hide from screen capture. Mootch is free with no accounts, ads or in-app purchases, covering notch placement, on-device voice scrolling, capture invisibility, offline operation and phone remote control over QR. Textream is free and MIT-licensed, with word-by-word tracking and Sidecar to an iPad, but needs macOS 15 or newer. NotchPrompter is free and open source and does the core mechanic properly without the workflow around it. QPrompt is GPL v3 and the only cross-platform option here — macOS, Windows and Linux — built for studio rigs, with no voice scrolling and no capture invisibility.
The trade with all four: they're free because they're small. What you give up is the surrounding workflow — script organisation at scale, imports, multi-device sync, rehearsal history, AI agent access — and, with the open-source ones, whoever happens to be maintaining the project that month. Avocado's free tier already covers the script library, imports and markers, so you don't have to choose between free and capable.
Where free reasonably stops
Not everything should be free, and the line falls in a fairly predictable place. A free prompter assumes the simple case: one person, one script, one screen, one take. That holds right up until it doesn't — a client review where someone else needs to slow you down mid-sentence, a course module whose script lives in a deck, a rig where a monitor and a phone need the same words at the same instant, a talk you'll run eleven times before it counts.
AI-driven features are the other reasonable exception. On-device pacing analysis, voice-following that actually tracks where you are in a sentence, and script rewriting cost real engineering, and it's fair for those to sit behind a paid tier. The question is never whether an app charges for something — it's whether the free version is complete enough to do the job, or deliberately broken so you'll pay.
That's the line Avocado draws. The prompter, the script library and the tools you touch every session are free and complete; voice scrolling on every take, multi-device, the full coaching breakdown and AI agent access are Pro. Start free — it doesn't expire, and there's no card to enter.
