Is Otter.ai free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
Verified on otter.ai/pricing 2026-09-25. Basic is free with 300 transcription minutes a month and 3 lifetime audio/video file imports. Pro is $16.99/user/month billed monthly or $8.49/user/month billed annually, with 1,200 in-app recording minutes, 10 imports a month and a 90-minute cap per meeting. Business is $30/user/month monthly or $24/user/month annually, with unlimited meetings and up to 4 hours per meeting. Enterprise is custom and is the tier that carries SSO, SCIM, the Otter API, webhooks and HIPAA compliance as an add-on.
When paying is still the right call
Otter is still the right call for a few readers, and not marginally. It captures calls without your machine having to be the one in the room, which matters if you attend from a phone or hand meetings to a colleague. Its CRM sync into Salesforce and HubSpot, admin activity logs, usage analytics, SSO, SCIM and the HIPAA add-on are governance you would otherwise have to assemble and own yourself. If you are a light user, 300 free minutes a month may already cover you, and nothing here is cheaper than free. Local transcription is also not free of cost — it uses your CPU or GPU, drains a laptop battery, and a large Whisper model on modest hardware trades speed for accuracy. If your meetings are ordinary business calls and your team already works inside Otter, moving is a project, not an upgrade.
What you are locked into
Low on the app, real on the archive. Otter is not a file format you have to convert away from — but two years of recordings, transcripts and summaries live in Otter's cloud, and moving them is the actual work. Otter's own plan table puts export under Pro ("Advanced search, export playback") and does not list it under Basic, so on the free tier the easiest place to read your history is inside Otter. Unlimited storage is likewise a Pro feature. The Otter API and webhooks are listed on Enterprise only, so bulk programmatic retrieval is not available on the individual or Business tiers — a large archive comes out conversation by conversation. Worth doing before you decide anything: export a month of meetings and time it.
If you would rather not pay: Meetily
Meetily
MIT-licensed meeting notes that record, transcribe and summarise entirely on your own machine.
Community Edition free and open source — local transcription, local AI summaries, audio/video import, retranscription. Optional Pro licence is $120 per user per year, shown as $10/user/month billed annually against a $25 list price, with a 14-day trial; Pro adds speaker diarization, a custom AI model connector, custom summary templates, PDF/DOCX/Markdown exports and MCP/webhook/CLI integrations. Enterprise volume licensing is quoted. Verified on meetily.ai/pricing 2026-09-25.
See all 5 Otter.ai alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Otter.ai before you commit. More speech recognition & transcription decisions on Macrostack.