I Built Kumbuka Because Notion Wanted $20/User for Meeting Recording

I wanted Notion's meeting recording feature: automatic meeting detection, recording, transcription, and direct summary saving to my workspace for a clean, low-friction workflow.

Then I saw the pricing page. Enterprise plan. $20 per user per month.

For a small team, that math gets painful fast. So I built the same thing myself. It took a weekend, and now it's open source.

What Kumbuka Does

Kumbuka is a command-line tool for macOS that handles the full meeting workflow.

It watches your calendar (Google, Outlook, iCloud, anything synced to macOS Calendar) and prompts you when a meeting is about to start. Click record, and it captures audio through your microphone. When you're done, it sends the audio to a local Whisper server for transcription, then passes that transcript to Claude for processing.

The output is a structured meeting summary: auto-generated title, participant identification, decisions made, action items extracted, and a speaker-attributed transcript. If you've configured a Notion database URL, it saves everything there automatically.

Total recurring cost: whatever you're already paying for Claude API access. No per-seat licensing.

The Technical Stack

Everything runs locally on your Mac.

Audio capture happens through native macOS APIs. Transcription uses Whisper running on a local server (I recommend VoiceMode for easy setup). The processing step pipes the transcript through Claude Code, Anthropic's CLI tool, which handles the analysis and formatting.

Calendar monitoring runs as a LaunchAgent that checks every 60 seconds. When it finds a meeting starting in two minutes, macOS pops up a dialog asking if you want to record. The whole thing survives restarts.

Commands:

# Start recording manually
kumbuka

# Enable calendar monitoring
kumbuka monitor enable

# Check status
kumbuka monitor status

Build vs Buy in 2025

Running a small company means constantly evaluating whether to buy or build. The default advice is to buy. Focus on your core product. Don't waste time building internal tools.

That advice made more sense when building was harder. When a weekend project required setting up servers, managing infrastructure, stitching together unreliable APIs.

Local AI models are getting better. CLI tools like Claude Code make it easy to build internal tools.

When Notion wants $20/user/month for a feature that takes a weekend to replicate, the math changes.

Getting Started

If you want to try Kumbuka, the setup takes about ten minutes:

1. Install uv and Claude Code
2. Set up a local Whisper server with VoiceMode
3. Run uv tool install git+https://github.com/daredammy/kumbuka
4. Optionally configure your Notion database URL for auto-saving

Full documentation is in the GitHub repo

The name, by the way, is Swahili for "remember."