Why I Open-Sourced DepoAudio (and What Free Tools Do for Court Reporting)

I gave DepoAudio away. Free, open source, no account, no upsell. People in legal tech ask why — usually with the slight suspicion that there’s a catch. There isn’t. There’s a reason, and it’s worth saying out loud.

Some plumbing should just be plumbing

DepoAudio does one unglamorous thing: it gets court recordings out of proprietary formats and into standard audio, on your machine. That’s not a product so much as a fix for a problem that shouldn’t exist — a problem created entirely by vendors deciding your own recordings should be hard to open without their software.

Charging for the antidote to artificial lock-in would make me part of the thing I’m trying to fix. So I didn’t.

What free does that paid can’t

• It builds trust faster than any sales deck. A reporter who’s been burned by vendor lock-in doesn’t want a demo. They want a tool that works, that they can inspect, that won’t hold their files hostage. Open source says that out loud.
• It removes the excuse. “We can’t open these files” stops being true the moment the converter is free. The friction was never technical; it was commercial.
• It earns the right to build the bigger thing. When the plumbing is free and honest, the field is a lot more willing to come along for what’s next.

The bet

Free tools for the field, commercial products built to the same standard. That’s the shape of DepoStack, and DepoAudio is the first proof that I mean it. If you produce the record, DepoAudio is yours — and it’ll keep being free.

The professionals who produce the legal record have been treated as a market to lock in. I’d rather treat them as the people the whole system depends on. The free tool is just the most honest way to start.

What other piece of court-reporting plumbing should be free? I’m listening.