Fireflies.ai: The Free Tier's Real Catch, Pricing, and How to Turn It Off

What is Fireflies.ai?

Fireflies.ai is an AI meeting notetaker. It joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex calls as a bot named Fred, transcribes them, and turns the transcript into a summary with action items, per fireflies.ai's homepage, which bills itself as "The #1 AI Assistant For Your Meetings."

Fireflies makes several claims about its scale on its own homepage: "95% Accurate" transcription, "100+ Languages," and "USED ACROSS 1 MILLION+ COMPANIES." A G2 rating of 4.8 out of 5 is also shown. These are Fireflies' own claims, attributed here as such, not independently verified figures.

There is an internal inconsistency worth stating plainly. The homepage says "1 MILLION+ COMPANIES," but the Chrome extension listing for the same product describes it as "Trusted by 20M+ users across 500,000+ organizations." One million and 500,000 are both Fireflies' own numbers, from two different pages, and they do not agree. Treat either figure as a company claim, not a verified fact, and do not average them into a third number.

The Chrome extension itself carries a 4.5 star rating from 184 ratings and 100,000 users, and was last updated July 14, 2026, two days before this was written, so the listing is actively maintained. Beyond the meeting bot, Fireflies also captures through a desktop app, mobile apps, dialer integrations (Aircall, RingCentral), and direct audio or video file upload on every plan, including free.

Feature names on the product include AskFred (an AI assistant that answers questions across your meetings), Live Assist (real-time in-meeting suggestions), AI Skills (described as "200+" automated extraction tools), speaker recognition, talk-time tracking, sentiment analysis, and topic trackers. It integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Asana, Trello, Slack, and several other tools, per fireflies.ai.

Fireflies is built for teams, not solo use. Its homepage targets sales, recruiting, marketing, user research, engineering, finance, healthcare, and media teams. Nothing on the homepage is aimed at capturing your own personal thoughts outside of a meeting.

Is Fireflies.ai free?

Yes, with a real catch. Fireflies' free plan gives you unlimited transcription and unlimited AI summaries, no minutes-per-month quota at all, per fireflies.ai/pricing. That is a genuinely strong free tier compared to most meeting notetakers.

The catch is storage, not transcription. The free plan caps total storage at 400 minutes for your entire team, not per person. Roughly, that is about eight 50-minute meetings of shelf space. Once you pass that, older meetings become inaccessible to make room for new ones, even though nothing stops you from transcribing more.

Two more limits apply on the free plan: a 2-hour maximum recording length per meeting, and 20 AI credits, a unit Fireflies does not define anywhere on its pricing page. The FAQ section that would normally explain AI credits is collapsed behind JavaScript and does not load its answer text, so what an AI credit actually buys you is publicly undefined. Do not assume a specific meaning for it.

Here is the honest way to frame the free tier: unlimited transcription solves the "can I record this meeting" question. The 400-minute team storage cap is the actual constraint, and it shows up later, when your oldest meetings start disappearing while your team keeps adding new ones.

Fireflies' pricing page does not list a free trial or a money-back guarantee for any paid tier.

What do the paid tiers cost?

Three paid tiers exist as of 2026-07-16, per fireflies.ai/pricing:

Plan	Price	Storage	AI credits	Max recording	Notes
Free	$0	400 min/team	20	2 hours	Unlimited transcription and summaries
Pro	$18/seat monthly, or $10/seat/mo annual	8,000 min/seat	20	2 hours	720p video, transcript downloads
Business	$29/seat monthly, or $19/seat/mo annual	Unlimited	30	3 hours	1080p video, Multi-language Mode, team analytics
Enterprise	$39/seat/mo, annual billing only	Unlimited	50	4 hours	SSO, SCIM, audit logs, HIPAA, private storage

Pro's storage jump is the direct fix for the free tier's problem: 8,000 minutes per seat instead of 400 minutes total for the team. Business removes the storage cap entirely. The annual discount is steep either way: Pro drops from $18 to $10 a seat, and Business from $29 to $19, when billed annually instead of monthly.

Enterprise is where HIPAA compliance and private storage actually live. Fireflies' homepage lists HIPAA as a product-wide security badge alongside SOC 2 Type II and GDPR, but its own pricing page lists HIPAA compliance and private storage under Enterprise-only features. If your organization needs HIPAA compliance specifically, you need the Enterprise plan, regardless of what the homepage badge suggests. "Zero Data Retention," meaning recordings are not used to train Fireflies' AI models, is also a homepage claim, attributed here as one.

AI credits scale with plan (20, 20, 30, 50) but are not defined anywhere on the public pricing page beyond that count. If a specific workflow depends on a certain number of AI credits lasting a certain amount of use, that detail is not published, so confirm directly with Fireflies before committing to a plan on that basis.

One oddity in the pricing table as displayed today: video recording quality goes 720p (Free, Pro), 1080p (Business), then back down to 720p in the Enterprise row of the comparison table, on both a standard fetch and a raw HTML check of the page. Business is the highest-quality video tier shown; do not assume Enterprise beats it on video resolution based on this table alone.

How do you remove Fireflies from a meeting?

Use the meeting platform's own participant list. Per Fireflies' help center, the exact steps depend on where the meeting is happening:

1. Zoom: open the participant list, click "More" next to Fireflies Notetaker, and choose Remove.
2. Google Meet: open the participant list, click the three-dot menu next to Fireflies, and select "Remove from the call."
3. Microsoft Teams: open the participant list, click the "..." menu next to Fireflies, and select "Remove from meeting."
4. Fireflies dashboard: find the live meeting banner at the top of your home dashboard and click the stop icon.

One official note worth knowing before you rely on it: "If Fireflies is removed before 3 minutes, no transcript or notes will be created," per the same help article. Remove it earlier than that and you get nothing to show for the meeting so far.

For a meeting that has not started yet, edit the calendar event and remove [email protected] from the guest list, or open Upcoming in the Fireflies dashboard and toggle recording off for that specific meeting.

To stop Fireflies from auto-joining future meetings altogether, Fireflies' help center describes two settings: change Auto-Join Settings to "Only when I invite" instead of joining everything on your calendar, or create Recording Rules that block meetings by keyword, email address, or domain. Neither requires contacting support.

Unlike Otter, which has a documented chat command ("stop otter" typed into the meeting chat, per our Otter.ai review), Fireflies has no equivalent chat-based command in its own documentation. Removal goes through the participant list or the dashboard instead.

How do you delete a Fireflies account?

Go to Settings, then Account, and use the Delete Account section. Per Fireflies' help center article on account deletion, the exact steps are:

1. Open the Fireflies web app, click Settings in the main navigation, then Account in the bottom-left menu.
2. Scroll to the Delete Account section and click "Delete my account."
3. Choose a reason from the dropdown, with optional details, and click Continue.
4. Click "Delete Account" again in the final confirmation prompt.

Your account deactivates immediately once you confirm. Your data stays recoverable for 30 days if you contact support and ask for it back. After that window, per Fireflies' own wording, "your data will be permanently erased and cannot be recovered."

That 30-day recovery window is a meaningfully softer offboarding story than some competitors. Otter's deletion, by contrast, is instant and unrecoverable, and Otter hides the delete option entirely if your workspace has 2 or more members, per our Otter review above. Fireflies documents no equivalent workspace-owner maze in its own deletion article.

Is Fireflies right for personal notes?

No, not for daily personal capture, though it is a strong fit for its actual job. Fireflies is shaped entirely around meetings: a bot that joins a call, a transcript of what everyone in the room said, and a summary built for teams to search across later. Its integrations (CRM tools, Slack, dialers) and features (talk-time tracking, sentiment analysis, team analytics) all assume other people are on the call with you.

If your job is running meetings and you need a searchable record across your whole team, Fireflies is a purpose-built tool for exactly that, backed by an actively maintained product (its Chrome extension updated two days before this was written) and current help documentation.

If what you actually want is to capture your own thoughts, alone, the moment they show up, Fireflies is the wrong shape regardless of price. There is no meeting to transcribe, no other participant, and no team storage cap to worry about, but also nothing built for organizing a solo ramble into a task list or a note you can find again next week.

Full disclosure: InstantOwl is our product, and this is our blog. InstantOwl does not compete with Fireflies for the meeting-notetaker job. It is built for the voice note you record about your own thoughts, walking to your car or at your desk mid-idea, not for transcribing other people's meetings. InstantOwl is currently free to use.

Fireflies alternatives worth knowing

If your job is meetings, the honest comparison is Otter vs Fireflies: they are close competitors, and the real difference is what their free tiers limit. Otter's free plan caps how much you can transcribe (300 minutes a month); Fireflies' free plan caps how much you can keep (400 minutes of total team storage). Our full Otter.ai review covers its pricing, its auto-join complaints, and how to turn it off.

If you are looking at capture tools more broadly, not just meeting notetakers, our Otter alternatives roundup sorts options by the actual job they solve, meetings, cheap bulk transcription, personal capture, or dictation, with the same kind of sourced, exact numbers as this review.

Related reading

• Otter.ai: what it is, what it costs, and how to turn it off: the closest comparison, another meeting-shaped tool with a different free-tier catch.
• Otter.ai alternatives by what you actually need: meeting notetakers, personal capture, and dictation tools sorted by job.
• Otter vs Fireflies: a side-by-side on pricing, offboarding, and which one fits teams of different sizes.