Fathom

Nothing is capped at $0 — not recordings, not transcription, not storage, not downloads, not clips — no meeting cap, no minute allowance, no lookback window on your own calls. Most notetakers meter exactly those things, so the free tier is not a trial in disguise but a complete personal product, and the vendor says as much in its own FAQ: the app is free because usage generates leads for the paid plans. What you buy when you pay is not more capacity but better output and, above that, a shared layer.

Each rung is a different buyer. Premium at $20 a month sharpens the individual experience — advanced summaries, action items, follow-up emails drafted for you, an assistant you can question about a call. Team at $19 per user is the first genuinely collective purchase: global search across everyone's shared calls, playlists, comments, keyword alerts, custom vocabulary and single sign-on, with a two-user minimum. Business at $34 changes category again, syncing fields into the CRM and adding deal views and AI coaching scorecards, which is conversation intelligence rather than note-taking and usually a sales-leadership budget.

The bot still joins the meeting. Capture without one is listed as a Mac beta and the vendor's own FAQ says it is not quite here yet, so plan on a visible participant in every call. And the compliance position is strong and specific — SOC 2 Type II audited, HIPAA compliant, end-to-end encryption, complete erasure on request, no data sold — with recordings private by default and shareable without your personal notes attached. For anyone recording customer conversations, that combination is usually the deciding factor rather than the summary quality.