You dictate the instruction, not the code. Press the microphone in the Clodex composer, describe the change in a sentence, and the transcript lands in the prompt box for you to read and edit before it is sent to Claude Code or Codex.
One credit is one cent of transcription cost. Starter includes 500 credits a month, Pro 1,000 and Max 2,000 — roughly 33, 67 and 133 hours of audio at the current rate.
Running out stops dictation and nothing else. The agents, the live preview, the design tools and image generation are unlocked on every plan and are never metered. The allowance resets on the first of the calendar month, in UTC.
Why talk to an agent
Dictation has always been an awkward fit for programming, and for a good reason: source code is punctuation-dense, case-sensitive and unforgiving, and saying it out loud is slower and more error-prone than typing it. Every attempt to dictate code runs into that wall.
Prompting is a different activity. What you send an agent is a sentence in English — the cards on the pricing section are too close together on tablet, and the middle one should stay the tallest — and that is exactly the kind of thing people say faster than they write. The punctuation problem disappears because there is barely any punctuation.
So the useful version is narrow and it is the one Clodex ships: the microphone is in the prompt composer, beside the attach and send controls. You hold it, describe what you want, and the transcript appears in the box as ordinary editable text. Nothing is sent until you send it, so a misheard word is a keystroke to fix rather than a wasted agent run.
It pairs particularly well with the design tools, because the other half of the same problem is pointing. Box a region of the live preview to say which thing you mean, then say what should happen to it. Between the two you have described a change without typing a selector or a filename.
What a credit is
One dictation credit is one cent of the underlying speech-to-text cost. That is the whole definition, and the reason it is worth stating plainly is that most tools in this space quote minutes.
Minutes are the friendlier unit right up until the transcription rate changes, at which point "500 minutes" quietly becomes a different amount of money and either you or we absorb the difference without anyone deciding to. The allowance here is a cost cap, so it is written in the unit the cost is actually in. A credit means the same thing next year as it does today.
Usage is measured against the audio you actually send, fractionally, and only rounded when it is displayed. A hundred short dictations are counted as what they were rather than each rounding up into a credit that was never spent.
What each plan includes
Every plan unlocks the entire application. The dictation allowance is the only thing that differs between them, which makes this table short.
| Plan | Credits / month | Approx. audio | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 500 | about 33 hours | $15/mo, or $12/mo billed yearly |
| Pro | 1,000 | about 67 hours | $25/mo, or $20/mo billed yearly |
| Max | 2,000 | about 133 hours | $50/mo, or $40/mo billed yearly |
For most people Starter's 33 hours is more than a month of dictation, because dictation is used in bursts of a sentence or two rather than held down for an afternoon. Max exists for the people who genuinely talk to the app all day. The pricing page has the full breakdown, including what the plans deliberately do not differ on.
When you run out
Dictation stops. That is the entire consequence, and it is worth being explicit because metered features in other products often gate more than the meter suggests.
- Claude Code and Codex keep running. They are on your subscription, not ours, and were never metered by Clodex in the first place.
- The live preview and every design tool — move, resize, spacing, colour, typography, layering, crop, box-and-ask — are unlocked on all three plans and carry no allowance.
- Image generation is likewise unmetered by Clodex.
- You can still type. The composer is a text box first; the microphone is an input method for it, not the way in.
The allowance is granted per calendar month, in UTC — not on your subscription anniversary. That is a deliberate simplification: an anniversary period would mean a per-user lookup on every debit, which is a network round trip in the middle of a dictation, and the difference only ever shows up in your first partial month. Unused credits do not roll over.
The app shows the remaining balance and an approximate time left, so running out should not be a surprise.
Where the audio goes
Dictation is the one feature that necessarily leaves your machine, so it deserves a straight description rather than a reassuring adjective.
Audio is sent to a small Clodex broker service, which forwards it to a third-party transcription provider and returns the text. The broker exists for a specific reason: the alternative is embedding a transcription key inside the desktop application, where anyone who wanted it could extract it and spend your allowance and our money. The key lives only as a server-side secret on the broker.
- It verifies your account, then issues a short-lived, audio-only token. Your account credential is not stored by it.
- Per-user and per-IP limits cap concurrency, duration, request count and daily audio volume, so a stolen token cannot be used to run up a bill.
- Nothing sensitive is logged. Request URLs, credentials, audio, transcripts and upstream responses are kept out of application logs. A refused request records the reason, the plan and a truncated hash of the account — enough to explain a rate-limit report without naming anyone.
- Your project files never take this path. Only the audio you record does. Source code, credentials and API keys stay on your machine.
The security page documents the broker in full, and the current transcription subprocessor is named in the privacy policy.
What it does not do
The boundaries here are mostly deliberate, and a couple of them are the reason the feature works at all.
- It is not voice control of the application. There are no spoken commands that drive menus, open files or click things. The microphone fills the prompt box; everything else is the mouse and the keyboard.
- It does not dictate source code. You describe the change and the agent writes the code. Speaking punctuation and camelCase aloud is slower than typing it, and pretending otherwise would make the feature worse.
- It does not send automatically. The transcript is editable text in the composer and stays there until you send it. This is on purpose — silent auto-send turns a misheard word into a wasted agent run.
- It requires a connection. Transcription is not on-device, so dictation is the one part of Clodex that does not work offline.
- It is not a free tier's worth of anything. All three plans are paid, and the allowance is the only thing that scales with them.
Common questions
Can I code by voice with Claude Code or Codex?
Not on their own — both are text interfaces. Clodex adds dictation around them: press the microphone in the composer, say what you want, and the transcript lands in the prompt box where you can read and edit it before sending.
You are dictating the instruction, not the source code, which is what makes it practical. You describe the change in a sentence and the agent writes the code.
What is a Clodex dictation credit?
One credit is one cent of the underlying speech-to-text cost. Clodex meters dictation in credits rather than minutes because the allowance is a cost cap, and a cap written in minutes silently changes value whenever the transcription rate moves.
A credit is pinned to money, so the number means the same thing next year as it does today.
How many hours of dictation do I get per month?
Starter includes 500 credits, Pro 1,000 and Max 2,000, each month. At the current transcription rate that is roughly 33, 67 and 133 hours of audio respectively.
The credit figures are exact. The hour figures are an approximation that moves with the underlying rate.
What happens when I run out of dictation credits?
Dictation stops for the rest of the calendar month and nothing else does. Every other part of Clodex — the agents, the live preview, the design tools, image generation — is unlocked on all three plans and is not metered, so the app keeps working exactly as it did.
The allowance resets at the start of the next calendar month, in UTC.
Do unused dictation credits roll over?
No. The allowance is granted per calendar month and is measured against that month's usage, so anything unused at the end of the month is not carried forward.
The reset is on the calendar month in UTC rather than your subscription anniversary — a deliberate simplification that avoids a per-user lookup in the middle of every dictation.
Is my audio stored or used for training?
Audio passes through a Clodex broker service to a third-party transcription provider and is not written to application logs — not the audio, not the transcripts, not the upstream responses.
The broker exists so the transcription key never ships inside the desktop app where it could be extracted; it issues a short-lived, audio-only token per session instead. The current subprocessor is named in the privacy policy, and the security page documents the broker in full.
Why is dictation the only thing Clodex meters?
Because it is the only thing Clodex pays for on your behalf. Claude Code and Codex run on your own subscription or API key, so that usage is between you and Anthropic or OpenAI — Clodex adds no meter on top of it and does not resell tokens.
Transcription is billed to Clodex per hour of audio, which is why it carries an allowance and why the allowance is the only difference between the three plans.
Describe it out loud.
The microphone is in the composer, next to the thing you were going to type into.
- Clodex security — section 4 documents the dictation broker, its tokens and its rate limits.
- Privacy policy — the current transcription subprocessor and what is retained.
- Clodex pricing — the three plans, both billing periods and the full comparison.