Meeting AI free tiers — the limit that stops you is not the monthly one

The order things run out

• Per-recording cap — one thirty-minute meeting may not fit
• Account count — a single-user plan cannot be shared with a team
• Summarisation and speaker separation — transcription free, summary paid
• Monthly total minutes — surprisingly, the last thing you hit

'120 free minutes a month' sounds like two hours to experiment with. Combined with a three-minute cap per recording, it covers no real meeting at all. Always read the monthly number and the per-recording number together.

What the main tools give you free

Three thresholds for paying

1. More than two meetings a week

One a week fits inside a free tier. Past two, you start hitting both the monthly and per-recording limits, and 'no capacity left this month' arrives mid-task. One month of that and people go back to handwritten notes, which ends the experiment.

2. Someone other than you reads the output

As a personal memory aid, imperfect accuracy is harmless. Once colleagues read it as the record of the meeting, misattributed speakers and wrong proper nouns do real damage. Speaker separation and custom vocabulary are usually paid features.

3. You start searching the archive

Once the question becomes 'which meeting was that in?', retention matters. Free plans often cap how long data is kept, and if last quarter's transcripts are gone the search use case does not exist.

Getting the most out of a free tier

• Send only important meetings to the AI; keep handwritten notes for the recurring ones
• Record everything but transcribe selectively, where the tool separates the two
• Do the summarising in a general-purpose AI chat instead of paying for the feature

The third is common in practice: use the transcription tool to get text, then paste it into a general assistant for the summary. It keeps you inside the free tier — but pasting a transcript into another service is a data transfer, so check internal policy before making it a habit.

Frequently asked questions