The cleaned file is the free file. No watermark, no trial length, no account — files up to 45 minutes. A pass adds loudness levelling and a heavier repair pass for rough recordings.
There is one of each. I wrote CleanGrab and I run it on a computer standing in a room in the Netherlands, switched on day and night, on my own power bill. No company, no investors, no support department: the contact form goes to the person who wrote the code, which is also the person typing this.
The hard numbers, so you know before you upload. Every value here is what the server actually enforces.
| Free | With a pass | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free. No account, no sign-up, no card. | €5 for 30 days, or €3 for 24 hours |
| Deep cleanup | Standard | Yes — for recordings with echo or background noise. A recording that already sounds good will not get better; the deep pass is for recordings that need it. |
| Maximum length | 45 minutes | 3 hours |
| Files per batch | 3 | 25 |
| Jobs at once | 2 | 4 |
| Strength control | No | Yes |
| Results kept for | 45 minutes | |
| Maximum file size | 1 GB | |
| Input formats | 16 audio and video formats: MP3, WAV, FLAC, M4A, AAC, OGG, OPUS, WMA, AIFF, AIF, MP4, MOV, MKV, WEBM, AVI, M4V | |
| Output | Cleaned MP3 (192 kbps) and a lossless WAV — both free. | |
| Where it runs | On our own graphics cards in the Netherlands. Your recording is never sent to a third-party service. | |
| Your upload | Deleted the moment processing finishes, success or failure — on both tiers. | |
| Watermark | None, on any output, on either tier. | |
The free tier is not a trial and does not run out. What the pass buys is length, volume and the strength control — the noise model is the same either way.
Krisp, Cleanvoice and Adobe Podcast Enhance are rented software running on rented hardware, billed by the second, so your audio costs them money for as long as it is processing. That is why you get minutes per month, an account and a paid tier one click away. It is not stinginess, it is their bill. Mine was paid once, when I bought the machine. Running our own model over a three-minute voice memo costs me about what a lamp costs in a minute, so the free tier isn't metered by the minute — just a simple 10 recordings a day, resetting at midnight, and no account needed to get them. The ads pay the electricity and the domain name. If they stop paying for it, I will write that on this page rather than quietly make the free version worse.
The privacy setup is deliberately boring:
CleanGrab cleans up speech entirely on that same machine. One upload gives you a cleaned voice back with hum, hiss, fans, air conditioning, traffic, street noise and keyboard clatter suppressed, plus a strength control (Gentle / Balanced / Strong) so you can dial in how aggressive the cleanup is.
CleanGrab is tuned for voice and speech — podcasts, interviews, calls, voice memos, lectures. Feed it music or other non-speech audio and the result can be poor; the tool will tell you when it couldn't detect clear speech instead of handing you a mangled file. And heavy room echo or reverb is a genuinely harder, separate problem: CleanGrab reduces light echo, but it will not fully erase a very reverberant room, and neither will most other tools, including the polished paid ones. I would rather say that plainly on the front page than promise something the model cannot deliver.
Adobe Podcast, Krisp and Cleanvoice are well-built, polished products with real engineering behind them, and on some recordings their processing can sound very refined — sometimes to the point of over-smoothing a voice. CleanGrab does not claim to out-perform them on raw audio quality. What it offers instead is simple: no sign-up, no watermark, 10 recordings a day, a visible strength slider instead of a black box, and files that are actually deleted rather than kept on a server somewhere. If you just need a noisy recording cleaned up without hitting a paywall, that's the whole pitch.
The cleanup is genuinely good on background noise — hum, hiss, fans, traffic, keyboard clatter — and rougher on heavy echo and non-speech audio: I say so on the front page instead of pretending otherwise. If something is broken or you have an idea, send me a message: it lands in my inbox, not a ticket queue.
Clean a recording, free →CleanGrab is one of the ShinobiTools, a small family of free, single-purpose utilities: noise removal here, video backgrounds, photo restoration, scan cleanup, and more. Each does one job well, with no sign-up and no upsell.
The byline. Sam Ridder is the name I write under, not the one on my bank card, and I would rather keep those two apart. Everything else on this page is straight.