Letterly Review: Turn Voice Ramblings into Polished Content

What Is Letterly and Why Did It Win Tool of the Year?

Letterly earned a spot as one of AppSumo's Tools of the Year for 2024, and it's easy to see why. In a world drowning in AI tools, Letterly does something genuinely useful: it lets you talk into your phone and transforms that raw, unfiltered speech into polished, usable content.

This isn't just another transcription app. The magic happens between the speech and the text. You can ramble about your grocery list, brainstorm a newsletter, or dump your meeting notes — and Letterly cleans it all up with 27 different AI rewrite formats. Think newsletters, social media posts, formal emails, summaries, and even structured lists.

Plans, Pricing, and the AppSumo Deal

Letterly's pricing on AppSumo is based on the number of users and devices you need. Every plan includes the same core features: 27 AI rewrite options, unlimited notes, and recordings up to 15 minutes long. Plan one covers a single user on one device, and the tiers scale up from there.

There's an interesting quirk in the pricing structure worth knowing about. After plan two, you generally get two additional devices per code. But between codes five and six, you actually pick up an extra device — the count jumps by three instead of two. If you're buying for a small team, that could be a sweet spot for value.

Compared to the in-app pricing of $99 per year, the AppSumo lifetime deal at $59 one-time is a no-brainer if you plan to use the app long-term. The AppSumo deal maps to their Pro plan, which means any future features added to that tier are included.

First Impressions and Setup

Before even purchasing, the Letterly website makes a strong first impression. It's clean, well-designed, and professional — which might seem like a small thing, but in the world of lifetime deals, a polished website is often a reliable signal that the app itself will be well-crafted.

Downloading the app is straightforward. You can scan a QR code from the website for either the App Store or Google Play. On first launch, Letterly asks what you want to use it for — messages and emails, notes and ideas, journaling, or media posts. The onboarding is smooth and gets you recording within about 30 seconds.

Pro Tip: Cancel Your Free Trial Immediately

This is a tip that applies well beyond Letterly. Whenever you sign up for any app's free trial and you're not sure you'll keep it, cancel the subscription right away. You still get the full trial period — you just won't get hit with an unexpected charge when it expires.

On iPhone, it's simple: open Settings, tap your name at the top, go to Subscriptions, find Letterly, and hit Cancel Free Trial. The app confirms you'll keep access through the end of the trial period. If you end up loving the app, you can grab the AppSumo lifetime deal instead of paying the recurring subscription price.

The App Interface and Recording Experience

Letterly's interface is minimal and focused. The home screen shows your recordings with three buttons at the bottom: an AI text editor, the record button, and settings. The settings are bare-bones — general preferences, a link to contact the founders, and a field for entering your AppSumo license code.

Hitting record launches a clean screen with a waveform animation that reacts to your voice. There's a redo button in the lower left if you want to start over. Once you stop recording, Letterly transcribes your audio with a nice progress animation. The transcription happens quickly and you can navigate away while it processes — your recordings are saved automatically.

Rewrite Options: Where the Magic Happens

After transcription, you get three choices: keep the raw transcript, rewrite it, or edit the text manually. The rewrite menu is where Letterly really shines. The "Magic" option lets AI choose the best rewrite approach automatically. You can also choose "Slightly" for a light cleanup or "Significantly" for a deeper restructure.

Beyond those basics, there's a full content creation menu. You can transform your recording into an X post, X thread, Facebook post, LinkedIn post, video script, newsletter, journal entry, and more. The structured option reformats your text with bullet points and headings. There are casual and formal email options, short and detailed summaries, and even meeting takeaway formats.

One standout feature: the list mode. During testing, a rambling grocery run-through — complete with filler words and tangents — came back as a clean, organized shopping list. Berries, avocados, turkey deli meat, toilet paper, avocado oil. All the fluff stripped away. That alone could justify the purchase for people who think out loud.

Editing, Favorites, and Navigating Rewrites

Every rewrite you generate is saved as a swipeable version. Rather than deleting a rewrite to try another format, you can simply swipe right to get back to the original text and generate a new version. All your rewrites stack up and you can browse through them at any time.

There's no limit on how many rewrites you can run on a single recording, which is a generous touch. The only real constraint is the 15-minute recording cap. If you find yourself using certain rewrite formats frequently, you can star them as favorites for quick access at the top of the menu.

Screen-Off Recording and Offline Mode

Letterly continues recording even when your phone screen is off, which is great for meetings or situations where you don't want your phone lighting up. The transcription came back perfectly during testing with the screen locked the entire time.

Offline mode also works as advertised. You can record without any internet connection and the audio is saved locally. Once you reconnect, the transcription and AI rewrite features kick in almost immediately. The app handles the transition seamlessly — no lost recordings, no errors. It's clear the developers thought through real-world usage scenarios where you might not always have a signal.

Sharing and Export Limitations

Sharing content from Letterly uses your phone's native share sheet, so you can send text to any app — Notes, Messages, email, Slack, whatever you have installed. The catch is that Letterly outputs everything in Markdown format. Apps that support Markdown will render it beautifully, but apps like Apple Notes will show the raw formatting characters (asterisks, hash marks, etc.).

A welcome future improvement would be an option to export in HTML or rich text format. Markdown is great for technical users, but if Letterly wants to reach a broader audience, offering multiple export formats would remove a real friction point.

Final Verdict: 7.7 out of 10

Letterly is a beautifully designed app with solid execution. It does exactly what it promises — turns your voice ramblings into structured, usable content across dozens of formats. The interface is clean, recordings are reliable even offline or with the screen off, and the rewrite quality is genuinely useful.

The biggest question mark is longevity. Apple, Google, and Samsung are all baking deeper AI features into their default apps. It's possible that in a year or two, your phone's built-in voice assistant could handle the same tasks natively. The 15-minute recording limit also feels restrictive for meeting use cases where a one-hour cap would be far more practical. And a desktop version would be a significant upgrade — being able to record and rewrite directly on your computer would open up workflows that phone-only access can't match.

That said, right now, Letterly works and it works well. If you frequently find yourself thinking out loud and wishing those thoughts were already written down in a polished format, this is worth a serious look — especially at the AppSumo lifetime deal price.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.