All tiers (Free + Pro + Pro AI)
Consent, built into the recording.
Two-party consent management isn't a separate workflow. It's the first thing the app does when you press record — and it works in every state, in every Bonfiyah tier.
Consent is a feature, not a footnote.
Every other recording app in the category treats consent as your problem. They give you a microphone and a button and a privacy policy and trust you to figure out the rest. In states where two-party consent is the law — California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington, plus Connecticut and Oregon under specific conditions — that's a legal exposure those apps quietly hand to their users.
Bonfiyah handles consent the way it should be handled: as a first-class feature, baked into the recording flow, with a defensible audit log of who agreed to be recorded and when.
How consent works in Bonfiyah
- 1
State detection
When you tap record, Bonfiyah checks your current location (or your saved default jurisdiction) and surfaces the consent rule for that state in plain language. "California is a two-party consent state — every participant must be informed that the recording is happening." No reading required.
- 2
Recorded consent prompt (optional but recommended)
You can play a short recorded prompt at the start — your own voice, or a generated prompt — that says: "This conversation is being recorded by Bonfiyah. Please say 'yes' if you consent to being recorded, or 'no' if you don't." The prompt is captured as the first segment of the recording.
- 3
Verbal consent capture + log
Each participant's "yes" (or "no") is detected, attributed to a speaker, timestamp-logged, and stored alongside the recording in a tamper-evident consent record. The log includes: timestamp, location, jurisdiction, prompt text used, each participant's response, the speaker fingerprint that links the response to the person.
- 4
Revocation handling
If anyone says "stop recording" or "I don't want this recorded" mid-conversation, Bonfiyah surfaces an alert and gives you the option to: (a) pause the recording, (b) delete the recording entirely, (c) redact the speaker's contributions from the transcript while preserving the rest. The choice is logged.
- 5
Export for legal use
The consent record exports as a PDF with chain-of-custody hash, suitable for evidentiary purposes. Talk to your attorney before relying on any specific export for litigation.
Built-in state law guidance
Bonfiyah ships with a plain-language guide to recording laws in every U.S. state, plus the EU, UK, Canada, and Australia. The guide is referenced before each recording and available in Settings → Legal → Recording Laws. Updates ship with the app — when a state's law changes, an app update reflects it.
This is informational, not legal advice. Bonfiyah is a tool; your situation may have specific legal context (HIPAA for medical, attorney-client privilege for legal, journalism shield laws) that requires consulting a professional.
When you're recording yourself only
Many recordings are just you — voice notes, dictation, lecture playback. Bonfiyah recognizes single-speaker recordings and skips the consent prompt. The state-law guidance defers to the rule that applies to recording yourself, which (in every U.S. jurisdiction) doesn't require third-party consent.
When the law requires written consent
A small number of jurisdictions (and most professional contexts — medical, financial, legal) require written consent in addition to verbal. Bonfiyah supports this: send a consent agreement before the meeting via the app's "Pre-meeting consent request" flow (Pro). The recipient signs digitally; the signed agreement is attached to the eventual recording. The verbal consent prompt still happens at record time as a belt-and-suspenders measure.
FAQ
Is the consent prompt mandatory?
Bonfiyah's default behavior is to play the consent prompt in two-party-consent jurisdictions and skip it in single-party jurisdictions. You can override either — but in two-party states the override surfaces a warning, because the legal exposure is real.
Does the consent log work in court?
The consent log is designed to be admissible — chain-of-custody hashes, timestamped, location-stamped, with the recorded audio of the consent itself preserved. Whether it's accepted in your specific case is a question for your attorney; we make the most defensible record we can.
What about HIPAA?
Bonfiyah is not currently a Business Associate under HIPAA. If you're recording patient conversations, the on-device-only mode + your own BAA-signed iCloud arrangement may satisfy your covered-entity obligations — but check with your compliance officer. We're working toward a HIPAA-compliant tier; sign up below for updates.
Why is this in every tier instead of behind a paywall?
Because making consent management a paid upsell would be tasteless. Recording someone without their consent is a category of harm we don't want our free users to do.
Want the state-by-state law summary?
We'll send the same one-page recording-law summary that's built into the app, plus our take on what changes when the recording is for legal, medical, or journalism use.
Send the summaryOpens your email app. We respond manually until our newsletter system is fully set up. See our privacy policy.