The Cluely alternative that doesn't upload your transcripts.

Your transcripts never leave your device

Cluely had a mid-2025 data breach that exposed 83,000+ users' interview transcripts and screenshots. We took the architectural decision early: full transcripts and AI answers are encrypted at rest with the OS keychain (Keychain on macOS, DPAPI on Windows) and never uploaded to our servers. The transcript text is sent to our AI provider only at the moment you ask for an answer, and it's never stored or used to train models. Nothing on our infrastructure for an attacker to find.

A real quiet mode for meetings

Toggle ⌘⇧L and Live Audio runs as a transcript-only tool — no AI replies firing on every pause. Press ⌘⇧⏎ to fire an answer manually. Designed for stand-ups, design reviews, customer calls, and sales meetings where you want a transcript and an occasional assist, not constant AI suggestions. Cluely is built around continuous AI overlay; the meeting use case is bolted on.

Friendlier pricing for short cycles

Onsite loop next week and you only need help for one week? $10. Long search? $30/month or $180/year ($15/month). Cluely starts at $19/month annual ($228/year minimum) — fine if you're using it long-term, painful for a single interview week. The free tier is also more useful: blurred results with unlimited usage so you can verify the app works on your machine, vs. their 30-minutes-per-week cap.

How is InterviewCodeAssist different from Cluely?

Same core pattern — desktop app, captures system audio, AI suggestions during the call, screen-share excluded. Three meaningful differences: (1) we never store transcripts on our servers (Cluely's 2025 breach exposed 83K+ users); (2) we have a real quiet meeting mode (⌘⇧L) plus a structured STAR format for behavioral answers; (3) pricing — $30/month or $10/week vs $49/month or $228/year minimum.

Did Cluely really have a data breach?

Yes. In mid-2025 a breach exposed personal information, interview transcripts, and screenshots of more than 83,000 users. The exposed transcripts included real interview content from real candidates. Our architecture explicitly avoids this risk class — transcripts stay on your device, encrypted with the OS keychain, never uploaded.

Does InterviewCodeAssist capture my microphone?

No. Production builds capture only system audio (the other side of the call coming through your speakers) — never your microphone. Your own voice during a session is not recorded, transcribed, or transmitted anywhere. This is intentional and matches how Cluely also operates.

Can I switch from Cluely without losing my saved sessions?

Cluely's transcripts live on their servers; ours live on yours. There's no migration path because there's nothing on our servers to migrate. If you want to keep old Cluely transcripts, export them from their dashboard before cancelling. After switching, every new InterviewCodeAssist session is auto-saved to your encrypted local archive (⌘⇧H to review or export to Markdown / JSON).

Is the screen-share invisibility the same?

Different mechanism, same practical effect. Cluely uses a screen overlay rendered beneath the share-capture layer. We use the OS-level Content Protection API (NSWindowSharingNone on macOS, SetWindowDisplayAffinity / WDA_EXCLUDEFROMCAPTURE on Windows). Both keep the AI panel out of Zoom / Meet / Teams shares, so the other party sees only your normal screen.

Which one is right for me?

If you're comparing for a single interview cycle and price matters, our $10/week and free-with-blurred-results tiers are friendlier. If you care strongly about transcripts never being uploaded, we're the only choice. If you want maximum LLM choice (Cluely offers 9 models including GPT, Claude, Llama), Cluely wins on that single axis. We bet on Claude Sonnet 4.5 + Haiku translation as the right default for live answer quality.