Every free AI meeting notetaker leads with the same word: unlimited. Unlimited recordings. Unlimited transcriptions. Unlimited summaries. It is a genuinely effective marketing hook, and it is also, in most cases, quietly misleading. The unlimited part is rarely where free plans cut you off. The cutoff hides somewhere less obvious: how long your recordings survive, how much of a meeting actually gets summarized, whether you can download anything, and whether the AI features renew each month or run out once and never again.
I checked the current free plans of Fathom, tl;dv, and Fireflies.ai against their own pricing pages and help centers in September 2026. Here is the honest version of what "free" means for each one, including the specific limit that tends to flip the decision from "this is fine" to "I need to pay" within a couple of weeks.
The cutoff table, dated September 2026
Free plans change often, so treat this as a snapshot, not scripture. Everything below comes from vendor-published pages as of late September 2026.
| Limit | Fathom Free | tl;dv Free | Fireflies Free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recordings | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Transcription | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Basic AI summaries | Yes, unlimited | First 10 meetings fully summarized, then first 10 minutes only | Yes, unlimited |
| Recording storage | Unlimited | 3 months, then deleted | 400 minutes per team, total |
| Downloads / exports | Yes, unlimited | Only in a 4-week window before deletion | No transcript downloads |
| AI extras quota | None needed on free | 10 AI prompts, 10 AI reports, 20 integration credits, 4 clips, 5 uploads (lifetime, non-renewing) | 20 AI credits per month |
| Meeting length cap | Not stated on free | 3 hours (all plans) | 2 hours |
| CRM sync (HubSpot, Salesforce) | No, paid only | Triggered workflows burn limited credits | Limited integrations |
| Bot joins the call | Choice of bot-free beta or bot | Bot | Bot |
One row matters more than the rest, and it is different for each tool.
Fathom: the free plan that is actually free
Fathom is the outlier here, and it is worth saying plainly: the free plan has no hard usage wall that most individual users will ever hit. Fathom's pricing page lists unlimited recordings, unlimited transcriptions, unlimited storage, unlimited downloads and clips, and instant AI call summaries, all on the $0 individual plan, and the company's help center states the free version is permanent. Fathom also now lets free users choose between a bot joining the meeting and a bot-free capture option that is currently in beta for Mac.
So where is the catch? Depth. The free summaries are the standard chronological recap. What sits behind the Premium plan at $16 per user per month (billed annually, $20 monthly) is the layer that turns notes into a sales or account-management tool: advanced summaries built on frameworks like BANT and Sandler, AI-generated action items, and the conversational meeting assistant that lets you ask questions about past calls. A team that wants shared folders, keyword alerts, and playlists needs the Team plan at $15 per user monthly on annual billing, and the CRM field sync that automatically updates HubSpot or Salesforce records after each call lives in the Business tier.
The practical read: a solo user who wants reliable meeting notes can stay on Fathom free indefinitely. You hit the wall not by exceeding a quota but by wanting the AI to do more than summarize.
tl;dv: unlimited recordings, expiring everything
tl;dv advertises a free plan with unlimited recordings and transcripts, and that is technically true. The free tier's actual shape is defined in the company's help center article on free plan limits, and it is a masterclass in fine print.
Three limits do the real work. First, recordings on the free plan are stored for only three months, then deleted. You get a warning four weeks before each deletion date and can download in that window, but outside it, downloads are locked forever, even for someone on a paid plan. Second, the AI summaries are front-loaded: your first ten meetings get full automatic AI notes, and after that only the first ten minutes of each meeting get summarized. Third, and this is the one almost everyone misses, the extra quotas are lifetime totals, not monthly refreshes. Ten AI prompts, ten AI reports, twenty integration credits, four clips, five file uploads. Use them up in week one and they are gone for the life of the account.
There is a smaller annoyance on top: after three days, free-plan recordings move to archived storage, and unarchiving to rewatch the video can take up to an hour and a half. The transcript stays available, but the experience is clearly designed to remind you that paid users do not wait.
Pro removes all of this at 18 EUR per seat per month on annual billing (29 EUR monthly), which is the point of the design. For a fair number of people that is a fair trade. The problem is that "unlimited free meetings" as advertised and "ten fully summarized meetings ever, then recordings that vanish in 90 days" as experienced are very different products.
Fireflies: unlimited transcription, cramped storage
Fireflies.ai takes the opposite approach from tl;dv. Its free plan gives you unlimited transcription and unlimited basic AI summaries in more than 100 languages, with no monthly minute quota on the transcription itself. The wall is storage and export: the free tier holds 400 minutes of recordings total, and that cap is per team, not per person. A four-person team doing a few hour-long calls a week burns through it within days, and once the cap is reached older recordings become inaccessible as new ones come in.
Add the second and third squeezes: no transcript downloads or exports on free, and a pool of 20 monthly AI credits that gate the extras like AskFred queries and AI Apps. Free also has no video recording and a two-hour cap per meeting. When you upgrade, the numbers jump sharply: Pro is listed at $10 per seat per month billed annually ($18 monthly) and lifts storage to 8,000 minutes per seat while unlocking downloads and CRM integrations including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, and Pipedrive. Business at $19 per seat annually removes the storage cap entirely.
The honest framing: Fireflies free is an extended trial with generous AI and a small closet. It answers "can I record and summarize this meeting" with yes, forever. It answers "can I keep an archive of my calls" with no, quickly.
The Otter footnote
Otter.ai is worth one paragraph here because its free Basic plan is built on the model everyone assumed the others used: a monthly quota. You get 300 transcription minutes per month (a shared pool that does not roll over), live transcription, speaker identification, and just three lifetime file imports. Once the 300 minutes run out in a given month, you wait. Otter Pro at $8.49 per user per month billed annually raises it to 1,200 minutes with a 90-minute per-meeting cap. Compared with Fathom's genuinely unlimited free tier, Otter's is a metered sample, which at least has the virtue of being legible.
Who should stay free, and who hits the wall
If you take one meeting at a time, mostly want a summary you can skim before your next call, and do not need a searchable archive, Fathom's free plan is the clear default. It is the only one of the three where "free forever" and "free until you outgrow it" mean the same thing. Students, solo consultants, founders doing a handful of calls a week: you can plausibly never pay.
You will hit a wall fast if any of these describe you. You need recordings kept longer than 90 days, which is tl;dv's deletion clock. You need the full meeting summarized, not the first 10 minutes, which is tl;dv after meeting ten. You need a team archive of more than about seven hour-long calls, which is Fireflies' 400 shared minutes. You need transcript exports to feed another tool, which Fireflies free blocks entirely. You need AI summaries structured for sales calls, or action items extracted automatically, which is Fathom Premium.
The pricing cross-over is also worth knowing before you upgrade out of frustration. Fathom Premium is $16 per user monthly on annual billing; Fireflies Pro is $10; tl;dv Pro is 18 EUR per seat. If your reason for paying is CRM sync, note that all three gate it behind their mid tiers, and the cheap plans do not include it.
Two quick questions people actually search for:
Is Fathom really free forever? Yes, per the company's own help center: the individual free plan with unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and storage is permanent, with paid tiers adding depth, not quota.
Do tl;dv's free limits reset each month? No. The AI prompts, reports, integration credits, and clips are lifetime totals for the account. Only the AI credits in Fireflies' and Otter's plans refresh monthly.
Pricing and plan details are as published by the vendors around September 2026 and can change, so confirm on the official site before making a call. If you want a broader view of where AI tools earn their paid tiers across your whole stack, our guide to picking the right AI model for the job and our rundown of AI tools for every job role cover the same buy-vs-free question for the rest of the toolbox.
