Is Otter.ai free?

Otter.ai is free to start. The Basic plan costs $0 ¹ and includes 300 minutes of transcription a month ². It is a real product, not a time-limited trial, but its limits are tight enough that most people who hold regular meetings hit them within weeks. This page covers what the free plan allows, where it stops and what the paid plans change. The wider picture, including privacy and rivals, is in our guide to Otter.ai.

The free plan stops each conversation at 30 minutes

The monthly total is not the limit people notice first. Basic caps each conversation at 30 minutes ³. A one-hour call is transcribed for its first half and then the recording stops, so you lose the second half unless you start a new one. The same cap turns the monthly allowance into a small number of meetings: 300 minutes covers at most 10 conversations of full length ⁴.

Three smaller limits matter if you import audio or keep a long history:

• File imports: Basic allows 3 imports for the life of the account ⁵. They do not renew each month, so this is the wrong tool for transcribing a backlog of interviews.
• History: only the 25 most recent conversations stay visible on Basic ⁶.
• Vocabulary: custom vocabulary for names and jargon is limited to 5 terms ⁷.

What the paid plans change

Pro is the plan that fits ordinary working meetings. It raises the monthly allowance to 1,200 minutes ⁸. It costs $16.99 a month when billed monthly ⁹ and $8.33 a month when billed annually ¹⁰. Business, at $30 a month billed monthly ¹¹, lifts the longest conversation to 4 hours ¹².

Prices and limits are from Otter's pricing page, read on October 27, 2026, and they change, so check Otter's pricing page before you buy. Students and teachers with a .edu address get 20 percent off Pro ¹³.

It depends on how you meet

Whether free is enough depends on three things:

• Short calls, few of them. Stand-ups, quick client calls and lecture segments under 30 minutes fit Basic well, up to roughly ten a month.
• Hour-long meetings. Basic cuts them off. Either pay for Pro, or split the recording yourself, which is easy to forget mid-call.
• Many languages. Price is not the issue here: Otter transcribes only 6 languages ¹⁴.

The free plan also includes the meeting bot. If you connect a calendar and leave auto-join on, the bot will use your 300 minutes on meetings you did not choose. Read how to stop Otter.ai joining your meetings before you connect one. Free does not mean private either: the plan still stores recordings on Otter's servers, and the question is Otter.ai safe and private? covers what that means.

What to do

1. Try Basic first with short meetings and watch the minutes counter in the app.
2. Switch auto-join to manual so the bot only joins meetings you pick and does not drain the allowance.
3. Pay annually if you outgrow it. A year of Pro on annual billing costs $99.96 against $203.88 month by month ¹⁵.
4. Compare free alternatives if 30 minutes is too short. Our guide to free meeting transcription lists tools without a per-conversation cap, and for a one-off file you can use the free audio to text tool in your browser.

Otter is a meeting recorder, not a dictation tool. If you want to write by voice into other apps, built-in dictation is free on most computers; see the overview of transcription.