Edu

Minor thing worth checking before you commit, since one of these advertises searchable transcripts and voice memos: find out where those are stored and whether you can get them out.

A dictation tool that only types into other apps holds nothing and can be abandoned freely. One that keeps a searchable history of everything you have ever dictated is a small archive of your own thinking, and if it lives in a proprietary store with no export you have quietly acquired a dependency you did not mean to.

Not a reason to avoid them. A reason to know which kind you are installing.

Question 3 deserves more weight than you gave it, because the answer varies enormously and the difference is not advertised.

Some of these collectors only ingest counters: tokens, model name, duration, cost. Some ingest the traces, which means prompts and tool output, which means your source code and anything else the agent read - environment variables, config, whatever was in the files it opened.

Both are legitimate products. Only one of them is a decision your security review needs to be part of. Before a trial, ask plainly which one it is, where it is stored, and whether prompt content can be turned off while keeping the numbers. A vendor that cannot answer that quickly has told you something.

Your open-source proxy is decent but it is doing less work than you think, and I would swap it for a sharper test.

Open source protects you from the company disappearing. It does not protect you from the company losing interest, which is far more common - an abandoned repository you technically could maintain is not meaningfully better than a dead product, unless you were going to maintain it, and you were not.

The test I actually use: can I get my data out today, in a format something else reads, without asking them. That covers the abandonment case, the price-rise case and the acquisition case in one question, and it works identically for closed source.

Open source is then a bonus rather than the criterion. Plenty of closed tools pass this and plenty of open ones fail it because the format is theirs even if the code is not.