Last month I had a 47-minute Korean podcast I wanted English subtitles for. I opened TurboScribe, hit my "3 free files per day" wall, and stared at the $20/month upsell. I needed this once. Maybe twice a quarter. Paying $240 a year so I could occasionally convert audio into text felt like buying a treadmill to use at Christmas. So I closed the tab and did the thing every developer does when faced with a SaaS paywall: I asked whether I really needed the SaaS at all. The answer this time was no, and that turned into whisperweb.dev — a free Whisper transcription web app, a TurboScribe alternative that runs the model in your browser instead of in someone else's data center — and then a ChatGPT GPT layered on top of it. This is the story of why both exist and how they work together. The problem with paid transcription tools Otter.ai gives you 300 minutes a month, but only if you sign up, and only if your meetings are in English. Rev wants $0.25 per minute for their AI tier and you're handing them your audio.…