Not at all. You can trigger Quikra instantly from anywhere using customizable global hotkeys without ever opening the main application window. Once activated, a sleek AI panel appears right next to your cursor to deliver translations, explanations, or summaries.
The floating panel is fully interactive: you can edit the generated text directly, copy results with one click, or switch target languages on the fly. It stays open or can be pinned for continuous reference, blending naturally into your workflow until you manually close it.

No. Quikra records system audio on Mac using native frameworks, so you never need to install a virtual audio driver.
Specifically, it captures both system sound and microphone inputs on independent tracks without requiring clunky third-party tools like BlackHole or Soundflower. Therefore, your system remains clean, safe, and fully stable during recording.

Quikra has many features available for free, and even for the paid features, free users can get a certain number of trial uses each month. We also offer a 7-day free trial, so you can experience all the premium features before subscribing. You can choose a flexible monthly or annual plan to start your trial. For annual subscribers, the average monthly cost is only about half of what you’d pay monthly — roughly the price of half a cup of coffee.

We temporarily cap initial AI usage to prevent system abuse, protect overall stability, and guarantee fast response times for all subscribers.
Specifically, these current limits are just a temporary starting point during our early launch. We actively monitor real-world performance and will adjust or increase usage quotas as the system runs smoothly. Furthermore, we do not mark up or profit from your API tokens; our sole priority is delivering a reliable, long-term service.

We use a dual-engine AI architecture with an automatic fallback mechanism to deliver ultra-fast, uninterrupted screen translation, summary, and other services.
For the global region, OpenRouter powers our pipeline, using Llama 3.1 8B for quick translations and Llama 3.3 70B for explanations, summaries, and AI search. And if any network interruption occurs, the system instantly switches to Groq’s high-speed API to process your request. So you always get smooth performance, with no unexpected downtime.

AI search is a handy supplement to browser search engines, but it involves a fairly involved process. It starts by pulling relevant material through Brave’s web search API, then structures the results into a format that AI can work with, and passes that along to Llama 3.3 70B via OpenRouter (which doesn’t count against your AI quota). That makes it relatively costly to run. For now, we’re offering it as a bonus feature. If usage grows down the road, we’ll roll out a BYOK option to lift the usage limits.

Privacy is our top priority. Quikra’s core features—including recording, capturing, and local storage—are built natively on macOS and run entirely offline. Your screen recordings, audio tracks, and raw screenshots are processed and saved 100% locally on your Mac. We never upload them to any private servers.
The only exception is when you actively trigger our AI features (such as AI translation, explanation, summarization, or AI search). In these instances, only the text extracted from your screenshots is sent to reliable AI providers (like OpenRouter, Brave) solely to generate your on-demand results. Your screenshots themselves are never transmitted. This data is processed in real-time and is never used for model training or permanent storage. Quikra never transmits anything without your explicit action.

To deliver a smooth screenshot and scrolling capture experience on Mac, Quikra relies on the system’s screen content capture capabilities. A regular screenshot reads the current frame of the selected area directly, while a long screenshot continuously captures screen frames and runs an algorithm to precisely calculate the pixel offset between adjacent frames, seamlessly stitching them into a complete, high-resolution panoramic image locally. Because of this, under macOS’s security model, both single screenshots and scrolling captures require Screen Recording permission before the app can capture and access screen data.