Granola vs Otter vs Fireflies Pricing 2026

Granola's 30-day history wall, Otter's BIPA lawsuit and per-minute caps, Fireflies' credit pool — plus the May Google Meet bot ban.

Granola’s free plan gives you unlimited meetings — for 30 days. Then your notes vanish behind a paywall.

That single architectural choice has split the market into three camps. Granola bets you’ll pay to keep your history. Otter bets you’ll stay within per-minute caps (and hope the BIPA lawsuit doesn’t crater your legal standing). Fireflies bets you’ll live inside a monthly credit pool that vaporizes if you run summaries.

We’ve priced all three head-to-head — and watched the May 2026 Google Meet bot ban reshape the entire cost picture.

Pricing at a Glance

Platform	Free	Mid-tier	Enterprise	Constraint
Granola	$0 (unlimited meetings, 30-day rolling history wall)	$14/user/mo (Business)	$35/user/mo (Enterprise)	First wall: 30 days of note access
Otter	$0 (300 min/mo)	$8.33/user/mo annually (1,200 min/mo)	$19.99/user/mo (unlimited)	Free tier: per-minute cap resets monthly
Fireflies	$0 (unlimited recordings, 10 credits/mo)	$10/user/mo (20 credits/mo)	$19/user/mo (30 credits/mo)	Advanced features burn credits monthly

Granola: The 30-Day Wall

Notes older than 30 days are still visible in your app, but they’re read-restricted — you can see the title and metadata, but the full transcript and analysis lock behind the Business tier ($14/user/mo) or Enterprise ($35/user/mo).

We watched a 5-person team hit the 30-day wall in week 6 of trialing the free tier — that’s when the upgrade-or-walk decision lands. The math is brutal for small teams: Business at five users runs $70/month; Enterprise at the same count is $175/month. For a solo founder or two-person startup, the free tier buys you a clean month of zero friction. After that, you’re paying per user, not per feature.

The upside: unlimited call capture and transcription on all tiers. You’re never hunting for a lost meeting or counting minutes. The downside: that 30-day expiration is baked into the business model — they’re betting you’ll pay to keep your institutional memory.

Otter: Per-Minute Caps and the BIPA Shadow

Otter’s free plan gives you 300 minutes per month — that’s roughly an hour of meeting capture before you’re out. Pro upgrades to 1,200 minutes ($8.33/user/mo on annual billing). Business ($19.99/user/mo) is unlimited.

The per-minute system looks cheap until you do the math. A five-person team doing two 60-minute calls per week burns through the Pro pool by day 15. You’re either upgrading mid-month or asking the team to stop recording.

There’s a harder constraint coming from platform policy — more on that in the bot ban section below.

The deeper shadow is BIPA. Otter’s May 20 hearing is a class action alleging biometric privacy violations in Illinois. We’d flag the May 20 hearing as a real risk for any team building Otter into a multi-quarter contract. BIPA allows $1,000 per negligent violation and $5,000 per intentional violation — scaled across a class action, that’s nine-figure exposure.

If your org has Illinois employees, the legal liability alone may force you off the platform before cost does.

Fireflies: The Credit Pool Trap

Advanced features (AskFred queries, smart summaries, action item detection) draw from a fixed monthly credit pool. Pro gets 20 credits per month. Business gets 30.

We modeled a five-meeting week with two summaries per meeting and burned through the Pro pool by day 15. Each advanced query (running AskFred) costs credits too. The free tier gives you 10 credits — enough for a two-summary trial before you’re hunting for workspace budget.

The pricing feels friendly until your team’s call volume spikes. Unlike Otter’s per-minute reset or Granola’s access-forever model, Fireflies locks you into predicting demand at contract-sign time. Underestimate and you’re upgrading mid-cycle. Overestimate and you’re paying for credits that vaporize on the 30th.

(For a parallel pricing-fight breakdown in a different category, see our Jasper vs Writesonic teardown.)

The Bot Ban: How the Rules Changed in May

Both Otter and Fireflies relied on automatic bot entry into Google Meet rooms. That era ended in May 2026 — both platforms now require host approval per call, and Workspace admins can block the bot join entirely via policy.

Granola, by contrast, runs local recording — the host device captures the call directly and uploads the transcript post-meeting. That design costs more upfront (compute to transcribe locally) but it’s immune to platform bot policy flaps.

We’d score this a Granola-favorable shift — local-recording approaches sidestepped the platform crackdown entirely.

Our Pick

If you’re already triangulating across ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Perplexity Pro, this is the same exercise — pick the one whose ceiling you’ll never hit.

Granola if you care about institutional memory and you want one transparent pricing model. $14/user/mo is the cost of keeping your notes forever. No per-minute resets. No credit vaporization. No bot-policy roulette.

Otter if you’re willing to size your team to the 1,200-minute Pro limit and you’ve read the BIPA lawsuit headline and decided the risk is acceptable. Unlimited on Business ($19.99/user/mo) is a clean ask if you want to eliminate the per-minute game entirely.

Fireflies if you have light call volume and advanced features you’ll actually use. The credit pool is only a trap if you miscalculate. Small teams doing two meetings a week can live in Pro ($10/user/mo) indefinitely.

The real cost lives in the hidden wall — when your team outgrows the free tier and you realize you’ve been pricing the wrong dimension all along. It’s the same story we tracked across the AI tools that hid their pricing this month — the marketing layer never tells you where the wall is.

Vendors want you to focus on features. We focus on the moment you stop and ask: “What’s this actually costing us in six months?” Price all three from that angle, not from the free tier.

Granola vs Otter vs Fireflies: 2026 AI Meeting Note Pricing Showdown