AI tool comparison
Mike vs Stet
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Productivity
Mike
Open-source legal AI that reads docs, cites verbatim, and drafts contracts
75%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
Mike is an open-source legal AI platform built as a direct alternative to Harvey and Legora — without the vendor lock-in or per-seat pricing. It connects to Claude or Gemini via your own API keys and gives solo practitioners and small firms the same document review, contract drafting, and workflow automation capabilities that enterprise legal tools charge thousands for. The platform organizes work into matter-scoped Projects — persistent workspaces where documents stay contextually linked across sessions. Its Tabular Review feature extracts structured data from multiple documents into a spreadsheet view, with every cell backed by a verbatim citation you can click to verify. Workflows layer on top for repeatable tasks like credit agreement summaries and change-of-control reviews. Mike is built by Will Chen and is self-hostable or available as a cloud product. The fundamental pricing model is radical: you pay only your Claude or Gemini API costs. No license fees, no per-seat pricing. For small firms doing high-volume document review, the economics are dramatically better than any SaaS alternative at $500–$2,000/user/month.
Productivity
Stet
Local macOS dictation that sounds like you — not like generic AI prose
75%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
Stet is an open-source macOS dictation app that transcribes speech locally and then uses AI to clean up the output while actively preserving your personal writing style and tone. The core innovation is a voice model — a lightweight profile that learns from your past writing so the AI corrections don't flatten your voice into generic AI-ese. The result is meant to sound like you dictated it, not like it was passed through a generic LLM. The technical approach combines local Whisper-based transcription (nothing leaves your device during speech-to-text) with an optional AI refinement pass that can use your own API key (BYOK) or a $6.99/month subscription. The open-source release includes the voice profiling code, making it auditable and forkable. It's a direct response to Wispr Flow, which is closed-source and subscription-only. For writers, podcasters, and productivity users who dictate significant amounts of content, the voice preservation angle is genuinely differentiated. The proliferation of AI writing tools has created a recognizable 'AI voice' — flat, over-structured, and devoid of personality — that sophisticated readers are increasingly adept at detecting. Stet's bet is that preserving your actual voice is the most valuable thing an AI writing assistant can do.
Reviewer scorecard
“Self-hosted legal AI that runs on your own Claude or Gemini API key is genuinely clever — the pricing model alone makes this worth exploring. The codebase is clean and the tabular citation view is the kind of UX detail that shows someone actually thought about the legal workflow. Deploy this for any firm that's been priced out of Harvey.”
“Open-source, local-first transcription with BYOK is the right architecture. I've been burned by voice tools that upload my audio to servers I can't audit. The voice profile approach for preserving style is technically interesting — I want to see how it handles domain-specific jargon and code-switching between formal and casual registers.”
“Solo dev projects in legal tech carry serious liability risk — if the model hallucinates a clause or misses a citation, the consequences aren't a bad tweet, they're malpractice exposure. Until this has real-world usage data from actual attorneys and independent security audits, enterprise law firms should stay cautious. Also, Claude Sonnet or Gemini Flash are not the same as GPT-5.5 fine-tuned on case law.”
“The 'sounds like you' promise needs a lot of data to actually deliver — your voice profile is only as good as the writing samples it's trained on, and most people don't have a consistent, large corpus of their own writing. For casual dictators, this might just be Whisper with extra steps. Apple's built-in dictation is free and surprisingly good now.”
“Open-source legal AI is the first credible wedge against the Harvey monopoly on AI-native law. When every solo practitioner and boutique firm can deploy their own matter-scoped AI workspace for free, the power dynamic in legal tech shifts permanently. Mike is the kind of project that looks small today and reshapes an industry in five years.”
“Voice-first computing is coming back, and the arms race for authentic AI writing assistance is heating up. The distinguishing factor won't be transcription accuracy — everyone has solved that — it will be voice fidelity. Stet is building in the right direction: local processing plus personal style models. Expect this architecture to be standard in two years.”
“The tabular review UI is genuinely beautiful for a developer-built open source project — it solves the 'show your work' problem that makes lawyers distrust AI outputs. If the UX holds up under real document loads, this is the design template for AI tools in trust-sensitive industries.”
“This is genuinely exciting for writers and content creators. The homogenization of AI-assisted writing is a real aesthetic problem — everything starts sounding like the same LinkedIn post. A tool that actively fights that tendency by learning your specific voice is solving the right problem. Even if the voice model needs work, the direction is exactly right.”
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