What "Unlimited" Actually Means Here
An AI note taker does three separate jobs: it records the call, transcribes it, and runs AI over the transcript to produce a summary and action items. Free plans almost never cap all three. They make one generous, headline it as "unlimited," and meter another.
That gives you three kinds of free plan, and it is worth knowing which one you are signing up for:
- Transcription capped — the recording itself stops or runs out. This is the one that breaks: a summary of the first half of a meeting is worse than no summary.
- Meetings capped — a fixed number of meetings per month, then nothing until the reset.
- AI capped — you always get the transcript, but the good summaries run out. This degrades gracefully, which is why it is the best kind of free plan.
Every limit below comes from the vendor's own pricing page or help centre, checked in September 2026.
The Free Plans, Tool by Tool
Fathom Best free plan
Fathom's free-forever plan includes unlimited recordings and storage and, per its help centre, unlimited transcriptions in 38 languages. The metered part is AI: free users get advanced summaries for their first 5 calls each month, after which summaries fall back to the basic templates. Action items, follow-up emails and the "Ask Fathom" assistant belong to Premium, at $16/month billed annually or $20 monthly.
That is the AI-capped model, and it is the reason Fathom leads here: call number six still gets a full transcript and a usable summary, just a plainer one. It also offers a choice between a bot joining the call and a bot-free capture mode, currently in beta.
tl;dv 10 AI-noted meetings/month
tl;dv's own site describes its free plan as unlimited recordings and transcriptions with no card required, and AI notes for up to 10 meetings per month. That is double Fathom's advanced-summary allowance, with the same graceful shape. One caveat on sourcing: tl;dv's pricing page would not render its plan table for verification, so these figures come from tl;dv's own published material rather than the pricing table itself. Check the table when you sign up.
Fireflies 400 minutes of storage
Fireflies' knowledge base says auto-join allows unlimited transcriptions on the free plan, with structured summaries (overview, detailed notes, action items) included. The meter is storage: 400 minutes per seat, covering recordings, uploads and dialer calls. When it is full, you delete older files to make room — unlimited storage requires the Business plan. AI features like AskFred draw on 20 AI credits per month, and uploaded files are limited to 100 MB and 150 minutes each.
Four hundred minutes is roughly seven one-hour meetings kept at any one time. Fine if you export notes and prune; frustrating if you expect an archive.
Otter.ai 30-minute ceiling
The best-known name has the most restrictive free plan for real meetings. Otter's Basic plan gives 300 transcription minutes a month, but caps each conversation at 30 minutes. It also allows only 3 lifetime file imports and 20 AI chat queries per user (3 per conversation), with transcription in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese.
The 30-minute cap is the whole story. A standard one-hour meeting is transcribed for its first half, and the decisions usually get made in the second. Otter Basic suits stand-ups and short calls; for anything longer you need Pro, listed at $16.99/month or $8.33/month billed annually.
Read AI 5 meetings/month
Read AI's free plan covers 5 meeting transcripts and 5 meeting reports per month, with no maximum meeting length listed and unlimited storage. Five is about one meeting a week. Pro is $15/month billed annually or $19.75 monthly.
Granola No bot, 30-day history
Granola works differently: there is no bot. It runs on your laptop or phone and listens to your microphone and system audio, then — according to Granola — transcribes in real time and deletes the audio, keeping only the transcript and notes. The free Basic plan costs $0 but shows only a rolling 30 days of notes. Older notes are kept, not deleted, but you cannot open them without upgrading to Business at $14/user/month.
That makes Basic a working tool with a short memory, and a quiet upgrade path the day you need last quarter's call.
Krisp and Sybill: check what "free" means
Krisp's pricing page lists a 7-day free trial, not a free plan — useful for testing, not for running your meetings on. Sybill does have a permanent free plan, but it is a sales tool built around deals, CRM context and revenue teams; if you are not in sales, its free tier is not aimed at you.
Is Zoom or Google Meet's Built-in AI Free?
No, and this is the most common assumption to correct.
Zoom's support documentation lists Meeting Summary with AI Companion as requiring a licensed user on a paid Zoom Workplace plan — Pro, Pro Plus, Business, Business Plus, Enterprise and above. Free Basic accounts are not on the list.
Google Meet's "Take notes for me" requires an eligible Google Workspace edition or Google AI plan, and Google states it is only available if your account was set up through work or school or you have an eligible AI plan — so a personal free Gmail account does not get it. It supports eight languages, one per meeting.
If your company already pays for either, use what you have before adding a third-party bot. If you are on the free tiers, a dedicated note taker is the only free route.
Bots, Consent and Where the Audio Goes
Recording a call has legal and social rules that no pricing page mentions. Several US states require the consent of everyone on a call before it is recorded, and a note taker is a recording device whether or not it shows up as a bot. The practical rule is simple: say at the start that the meeting is being transcribed, every time, including on bot-free tools.
Bot-free tools like Granola, and Fathom's beta mode, are less intrusive — no stranger's name in the participant list — but they make disclosure more important, not less, because nobody else can see that notes are being taken.
For confidential conversations — legal, HR, medical, anything under an NDA — sending audio to any cloud service may not be acceptable at all. In that case the private option is to transcribe locally and summarise with a local AI model on your own machine.
Comparison Table
| Tool | Free Plan | What Gets Capped | Paid From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | Unlimited recordings, storage, transcription | AI: 5 advanced summaries/month | $16/mo (annual) |
| tl;dv | Unlimited recordings & transcription | AI: notes for 10 meetings/month | See pricing page |
| Fireflies | Unlimited transcription, summaries | Storage: 400 min/seat; 20 AI credits/month | Paid plans for unlimited storage |
| Otter.ai | 300 min/month | Transcription: 30 min per conversation | $8.33/mo (annual) |
| Read AI | Transcripts & reports, unlimited storage | Meetings: 5/month | $15/mo (annual) |
| Granola | AI notes, no bot, audio deleted | History: last 30 days visible | $14/user/mo |
| Zoom / Google Meet AI | Not on free accounts | Requires paid Zoom Workplace or eligible Workspace/AI plan | Included with eligible paid plans |
Which One Should You Use?
- You want one free tool that just works: Fathom. Nothing stops mid-meeting, nothing gets deleted, and the AI cap degrades gracefully.
- You need more AI summaries than Fathom's five: tl;dv, at 10 meetings with AI notes per month on the free plan.
- You hate meeting bots: Granola, as long as 30 days of visible history is enough — export anything you will need later.
- Your meetings are under 30 minutes: Otter Basic is fine for stand-ups. For anything longer, it is the wrong free plan.
- You have about one important meeting a week: Read AI's 5 per month fits exactly.
- Your company pays for Zoom or Workspace: check whether AI summaries are already switched on before installing anything.
Whichever you pick, the notes are only useful if the action items land somewhere. Paste them into your task list, and if your meetings are scattered across time zones, our guide to free AI scheduling tools for remote teams covers the other half of the problem. For tidying a transcript before sharing it, Remove Extra Spaces and AI Text Cleaner fix the stray spacing and odd characters exports tend to carry, Word Counter tells you whether a summary is actually shorter than the meeting deserved, and AI Prompt Templates helps if you would rather summarise a raw transcript yourself.