Buddy

Checking
From Buddy
Rare settings
Nothing in here is part of using Buddy. Your authorization code is set by saying or typing "set my authorization code to …". Buddy never speaks on its own — double-tap anything it wrote and the phone reads that one thing aloud.
Buddy asks for this before anything it can’t undo — deleting the brain, spending money, taking a client’s site live, writing to the real database, restarting the texts. It is never shown, never spoken back and never written down; your Mac keeps only a scrambled copy it can check against.
This app costs nothing extra. Talking to it uses your phone's own voice-to-text, and photos are read by your Mac — both free. Buddy's chats run real Claude Code on your Mac using the Claude plan you already pay for, so a very heavy day can use up that plan's limits, exactly like sitting at the laptop. The relay and the photo hand-off run on Cloudflare's free tier. The only thing that still costs anything is Twilio, about two cents when you send a picture by text instead of through this app.
Notifications. Your texts are paused, so everything Buddy would have texted you shows up under the bell at the top. To have the phone buzz you when one lands, this app has to be on your Home Screen (not just a Safari tab) and you have to tap Allow once.
Voice not working? Tap this and I'll say one line. Whatever the phone tells me about it shows up underneath, in plain words.