Otter.ai

Editorial assessment

Size Otter by two numbers, your longest regular meeting and your total recorded minutes per person each month, because every plan caps both. The six supported languages come first; if your meetings run in another language, no plan helps.

• BasicUSD 0

  if your calls stay under 30 minutes, you record fewer than about ten a month and a plain-text export is enough.

• ProUSD 8.33 per user per month

  once meetings run up to 90 minutes or you need about 20 hours a month, plus DOCX, PDF or SRT files and Salesforce or HubSpot sync for one user.

• BusinessUSD 19.99 per user per month

  when meetings exceed 90 minutes, the notetaker must cover overlapping calls, or you import long recordings; it removes the meeting-minute cap and allows up to 25 billed users.

• EnterpriseContact sales

  for SSO, SCIM, the public API, custom retention or HIPAA.

If you mostly edit recorded audio or video rather than capture live meetings, the Descript profile is the closer match, and Auphonic covers cleaning and leveling recordings before transcription. Both sit with Otter in the audio tools category.

Minutes are used every time Otter transcribes, whether from the notetaker, an in-app recording, an integration or an imported file. On Basic and Pro these sources share one monthly pool per user; Business makes meetings and in-app recordings unlimited and meters only imports. The pool resets each month at the date and time your billing cycle started, and leftover minutes are lost.

The per-conversation cap matters as much as the pool. On Basic a recording keeps running past 30 minutes, but only the first 30 minutes of transcript are visible until you upgrade and unlock the rest. Pro raises the cap to 90 minutes and Business to 4 hours. Deleting a conversation does not give its minutes back. Overlapping calls are a separate limit: the notetaker can sit in 1 meeting at a time on Basic, 2 on Pro and 3 on Business.

Basic shows only your 25 most recent conversations; older ones are archived, not deleted, and stay in the account indefinitely. You can still export an archived conversation, or delete recent ones so that older items move back into the visible 25. Sharing does not bypass this: if the owner is on Basic, a paid user they shared with also loses access once it is archived.

A cancelled Pro or Business plan stays active to the end of the paid period and then drops to Basic, where the 25-conversation view applies. Subscriptions renew automatically, cancellation should be made at least 24 hours before the billing date, and payments are not refunded. Subscriptions bought through the App Store or Google Play are cancelled there.

Basic exports transcripts as TXT and audio as MP3. Paid plans add DOCX, PDF and SRT, with options for speaker names, timestamps, highlights and removing Otter branding from text exports. Bulk export of many conversations as a ZIP file is limited to Business and Enterprise, and the outline and action items can only be copied, not exported as files.

Integrations grow with the plan:

• The MCP server for ChatGPT, Claude and other assistants is listed on every plan, including Basic; Zapier starts on Pro.
• Salesforce and HubSpot note sync covers 1 user on Pro, 5 on Business and unlimited users on Enterprise.
• Dropbox auto-import starts on Business.
• The public API, limited to 10 requests per second, and workspace webhooks are Enterprise features.

Recording laws differ: states such as California, Illinois and Florida require every participant to be told and to agree. Otter can email all calendar guests before the notetaker joins, and during the call the notetaker appears as a named participant. On Enterprise, Microsoft Teams users can require each participant to accept recording through an Outlook link before joining.

Otter stores data on AWS in the US West region with AES-256 server-side encryption. Its privacy policy says it trains its own AI on de-identified audio and on transcriptions, which may contain personal information, and shares data with labeling providers that create training data. Enterprise adds custom data retention and a HIPAA add-on.