Otter, Granola, Fathom and Fireflies pricing in 2026: what a year of AI meeting notes costs

The cheapest paid plan from the big AI note takers costs between $100 and $192 a year, and that is per person. Over three years, Fathom Premium comes to $576 and Granola Business to $504, before anyone on your team gets a seat.

I build TranscribeX, a Mac app that sells for $39 once, so I have an obvious interest in this comparison. That’s also why every number below comes from each vendor’s own pricing page, checked October 2026, with the free-plan limits written out in full. Where a cloud tool is worth its subscription, I say so.

Why AI note takers charge a subscription

Most AI note takers send your meeting audio to a speech recognition service in the cloud, then send the transcript to a large language model for the summary. Granola is unusually open about this: its security page names Deepgram and AssemblyAI for transcription and OpenAI and Anthropic for summaries.

Each of those calls is billed to the vendor by the minute or by the token. Every hour you record costs them money, so they charge you every month, and free plans come with minute caps, history limits or summary quotas.

Local apps work differently. The speech model runs on your Mac’s own chip, so an extra hour of transcription costs the developer nothing. That’s the whole reason apps like MacWhisper and TranscribeX can sell a one-time license. The trade-off is real, though: no web app, no shared team workspace, and your Mac does the work.

Otter.ai pricing

Prices are per user. The free plan also only keeps your 25 most recent conversations, so after a few weeks of daily calls the oldest notes drop out of reach. Pro removes that limit. Every Otter free-plan limit, explained.

Otter’s Notetaker joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet as a bot, and it now also has a Mac and Windows desktop app that records without one. Either way, transcription happens in Otter’s cloud.

Granola pricing

Granola records from your device audio, so no bot appears in the call. It’s the closest of the big names to how a local app feels. The audio still goes to cloud transcription providers, and Granola deletes it afterwards and keeps the notes.

Is Granola free? Yes, with one catch that matters more than it sounds: the free plan only keeps 30 days of meetings. If you want to search last quarter’s calls, you need Business. Some older articles mention a 25-meeting lifetime cap. Granola’s current pricing page doesn’t show one.

Fathom pricing

Fathom has the most generous free plan here: recordings and transcripts aren’t capped. The limits sit on the AI features instead. Advanced summary templates and Ask Fathom are “limited use” on the free plan, and Fathom doesn’t publish the exact numbers.

By default Fathom joins as a bot. A bot-free mode exists for Mac and is still labelled beta.

Fireflies.ai pricing

Fireflies advertises “unlimited transcription” on the free plan, but the storage cap is what you actually hit. 400 minutes is about seven hour-long meetings, shared by the whole team. Older reviews quote 800 minutes; the current page says 400.

Its bot, Fred, joins Zoom, Meet and Teams. The desktop app and Chrome extension can record without it.

Wispr Flow pricing

Wispr Flow is mainly a dictation app, so it belongs in a different bucket, but a lot of people compare it with note takers now that it has a Notetaker feature.

The Growth tier showed two prices on the day I checked, which I couldn’t untangle. Students and educators get 50% off Pro. Wispr Flow’s privacy page says transcription always runs in the cloud.

Total cost over 1 and 3 years

Here is the cheapest paid individual plan for each tool, on its cheapest billing option, next to the two one-time Mac apps. If you pay monthly instead of yearly, Otter roughly doubles to $203.88 a year and Fireflies goes to $216.

Cheapest paid individual plan at list price (USD unless marked). Prices checked October 2026 on each vendor’s pricing page (Otter.ai, Granola, Fathom, Fireflies.ai, Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, MacWhisper). TranscribeX Pro is a one-time purchase with free updates; the free version has no time limit.

A few things this table can’t show:

• Seats multiply. Every subscription above is per user. A five-person team on Fathom Team pays $900 a year.
• The cheapest plan isn’t always the one you need. Otter Pro still caps you at 1,200 minutes a month. Unlimited meeting transcription is on Business, at $239.88 a year billed yearly.
• One-time licenses have limits too. A TranscribeX Pro license covers one Mac at a time, and you don’t get a web or phone app.

Head-to-head: the price comparisons people search for

Otter vs Granola pricing

Otter Pro is cheaper per year ($99.96 billed yearly vs $168), but it caps minutes. Granola’s Business plan has no minute cap, and Granola never puts a bot in the call. If you pay monthly, Granola is cheaper ($14 vs $16.99).

Granola vs Fathom pricing

Fathom’s free plan beats Granola’s, because Fathom keeps unlimited recordings while Granola keeps 30 days. On paid plans Granola is cheaper: $168 a year against $192 for Fathom Premium.

Fathom vs Otter pricing

Otter Pro costs about half of Fathom Premium when both are billed yearly ($99.96 vs $192). On the free plans it flips: Fathom doesn’t cap recording time, Otter stops at 300 minutes a month.

Otter vs Fireflies pricing

Close on paper: $99.96 vs $120 a year billed yearly. Otter limits minutes per month, Fireflies limits storage (8,000 minutes per seat on Pro). Heavy users hit both limits eventually.

Fathom vs Fireflies pricing

Fireflies Pro is cheaper ($120 vs $192 a year), but on free plans Fathom wins clearly, since Fireflies caps storage at 400 minutes for the whole team.

One-time alternatives: what you give up and what you keep

If you mostly need notes for your own calls, a local app covers the core job for less than three months of most subscriptions. TranscribeX Pro at $39 is the price of 2.3 months of Otter Pro billed monthly, or 2.8 months of Granola.

Here is what that $39 does in TranscribeX: it detects the meeting in Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Slack and other apps, records without a bot, transcribes on your Mac with Whisper or NVIDIA Parakeet, labels speakers, writes the summary with a language model built into the app, and can email the recap when the call ends. None of it has a minute cap, because none of it runs on our servers.

MacWhisper is the other one-time option worth a look. Its Pro license is €64 and it also records meetings without a bot. Superwhisper is cheaper per year than most cloud tools at $84.99, or $249.99 for a lifetime license.

Where the cloud tools are worth paying for:

• Team workspaces. Shared folders, comments, and searching across everyone’s calls.
• CRM sync. Fathom syncs notes to HubSpot and Salesforce, Granola to HubSpot and Attio. A local app can export files, not update deal fields.
• Phone and web access. Otter, Granola and Fireflies all have mobile apps. TranscribeX is Mac only.
• Compliance paperwork. If your company requires vendor paperwork, Granola has a SOC 2 Type 2 report, and Granola, Otter and Fireflies offer HIPAA options on their top plans. With a local app the data never leaves your Mac, but there’s no vendor certificate to show.

How I’d choose

• You want free and you’re fine with the cloud: start with Fathom’s free plan.
• Your team lives in a CRM and shares call notes: pay for Fathom Team or Granola Business. The subscription buys real features.
• You take notes for yourself, on a Mac, and the audio is sensitive: use a local app and pay once. That’s the case TranscribeX was built for.
• You mostly dictate rather than record meetings: compare Wispr Flow with the free dictation built into TranscribeX before paying $144 a year.