Browser prompters: free, instant, and visible to everyone
If you want a prompter in the next thirty seconds on any machine, a browser tool is the answer. CuePrompter is genuinely 100% free with no paid tier, no account and no watermarks, for commercial use as well as personal — scroll speed, mirror mode for beam-splitter glass, a few colour themes, no voice scrolling. FluidPrompter has a free-forever plan with no login and is the serious pick if you're driving 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 the strongest — 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 honest 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 — and, with the open-source ones, whoever happens to be maintaining the project that month. If your requirements genuinely stop at "prompt me on my own machine," that's not a real cost.
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.
Avocado's free tier
Avocado is a Mac teleprompter with a permanent free tier: no card, no account, no expiry, no watermark. 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 passes every week on the free tier.
By the checklist above, that's a free tier rather than a trial: the cap is on script length in voice mode, not on time, features or your output. The parts that are Pro — unlimited voice scrolling, five synchronised displays, Director Mode, rehearsal history and AI agent access — are the ones that only start mattering once you're doing this weekly.
It's worth being straight about the trade-off, though. If your only criterion is "costs nothing forever and I'll never want more," a free app like Mootch is a perfectly good answer and you should take it. Avocado's free tier is the better bet if you might grow into any of the rest, because starting there doesn't strand you later. The full 2026 comparison puts all of them side by side on price and capability if you want the paid options in the picture too.