Otter.ai Pricing in 2026: What Each Plan Really Includes

Open Otter's pricing page and the first number you see for Pro is $8.33 a month. Sign up, pick monthly billing because you're not sure yet, and the charge is $16.99. Nothing on the page is hidden. The page opens on the Annual tab, and the two prices are a click apart.

That's the whole problem with reading about Otter AI pricing second-hand. The plans are sound, but the numbers depend on which tab you're on, which kind of minute you're counting, and how long your meetings run. Reviews tend to copy each other's mistakes.

You want a plain answer to "what does Otter cost, and which plan do I need?" Here it is. Every Otter fact below comes from otter.ai/pricing or Otter's help centre, opened on 2026-09-22, with the page linked next to the claim. You'll get each plan and what it includes, the limits that catch people, a worksheet to pick a plan from your own month, and two worked cost examples.

One disclosure first. ParrotNotes publishes this blog, and ParrotNotes is our app. It gets one section near the end, for readers who mostly meet in person or work in more than one language. Otter gets a fair reading everywhere else.

How much does Otter.ai cost?

Otter.ai has four plans, priced in USD. Basic is free with 300 transcription minutes a month. Pro is $16.99 per user a month, or $8.33 a month billed annually, with 1,200 minutes. Business is $30 per user a month, or $19.99 billed annually, with unlimited in-app recording, and Enterprise is custom pricing (checked on 2026-09-22).

Here's the same thing as a table, with both billing options side by side.

Source: otter.ai/pricing, plan cards and comparison table, both billing tabs read on 2026-09-22.

Two things to notice straight away. Annual billing roughly halves the Pro price, which is why Otter's page leads with it. And the Business row says "unlimited", but only for meetings and recordings made in Otter itself; files you upload are metered. More on both below.

Otter.ai pricing plan by plan

Each plan builds on the one before it. Otter's cards say "Everything in Basic, plus", "Everything in Pro, plus", and so on. Here's what each step adds.

Basic: the free plan

Basic costs nothing and has no time limit on the account. According to Otter's help-centre article on Basic plan limits, you get:

• 300 transcription minutes a month
• 30 minutes per conversation. Recording doesn't stop at 30 minutes, but "you will only be able to access up to 30-minutes of the transcription" until you upgrade
• Three file imports for the life of the account, "not per month"
• Your 25 most recent conversations. Older ones are archived, not deleted, and come back on a paid plan

The pricing page adds that Basic includes the notetaker for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, live transcription, speaker identification, AI Chat (20 queries a month, three per conversation), the iOS and Android apps, and a maximum of five workspace members.

Basic is a real trial, not a demo. Five hours of meetings a month is enough to see whether Otter's notes work for you.

Pro: for individuals and small teams

Pro is $16.99 per user a month on monthly billing, or $8.33 per user a month on annual billing. Otter's page marks the annual price "save 51%". Prices checked on 2026-09-22.

For that you get everything in Basic, plus:

• 1,200 in-app recording minutes a month (20 hours)
• Up to 90 minutes per meeting
• 10 file imports a month, drawing on the same 1,200-minute pool
• Unlimited conversation history and unlimited storage
• Advanced meeting templates and "advanced AI workflows"
• Team vocabulary (100 names and 100 other terms) and taggable speakers
• Export to pdf, docx and srt as well as mp3 and txt
• AI Chat up to 50 queries a month
• Salesforce, HubSpot and Zapier integrations, with a footnote: "subject to user limits" (the table shows synced notes for one user)

Pro's workspace is capped at five billed users, so it's the plan for a freelancer, a consultant or a very small team.

Student and teacher discount. Otter's pricing FAQ offers 20% off Pro for individual students and teachers with a .edu address: $6.67 a month billed $79.99 annually, or $13.59 a month on monthly billing.

Business: for medium-sized teams

Business is $30 per user a month on monthly billing, or $19.99 per user a month on annual billing ("save 33%"). On the day we checked, the Monthly tab also showed $24 a month with "20% off for 3 months", and a footnote: "Offer valid for first-time subscribers only". So budget on $30, and treat the $24 as an introductory rate.

Business adds:

• Unlimited meetings and in-app recordings. The comparison table puts it plainly: "Unlimited in-app recordings. Limit applies only to imported files"
• Up to 4 hours per meeting
• Unlimited file imports, with imported-file transcription capped at 6,000 minutes a month per user
• The notetaker can join three meetings at once
• Custom AI workflows, admin features such as activity logs and usage analytics, and prioritised support
• Up to 25 billed users, bulk export, and synced notes to Salesforce or HubSpot for five users

Otter labels this plan "Best Value", and for a team whose meetings run long, that's a fair label: the minute cap disappears.

Enterprise: custom pricing

Enterprise has no listed price; the card says "Schedule a demo". Beyond Business, the page lists unlimited custom AI workflows, Otter Sales Notetaker, custom CRM and dialer integrations, SSO, SCIM and domain capture (the table notes a "minimum 100-user license required" for SSO and SCIM), the Otter API and webhooks, video replay for Zoom and Google Meet, and a customer success programme.

Notice where Otter Sales Notetaker sits. If you're a sales rep reading about Otter because of its sales features, they're an Enterprise conversation, not a Pro checkbox. Our ParrotNotes vs Otter.ai for sales teams comparison goes into that in detail.

The Otter.ai limits that catch people

The prices are simple. The limits are where people get surprised, usually in the third week of the month. Here are the six to check before you buy.

Minutes are per user, per month, and don't roll over

Every minute figure on Otter's page is "per user", and the table says "no rollover" next to both monthly limits. Unused minutes vanish at the end of the cycle.

When you run out, Otter's help centre says "you will not be able to record or import recordings until your next monthly cycle". There's no overage rate to pay; you wait or upgrade. And "deleted conversations will still count towards the transcription limit", so clearing out old recordings doesn't buy minutes back.

Picture Hannah, a recruiter on Basic. She runs three 40-minute screening calls a day. By the second Friday she's used her 300 minutes, and each call after minute 30 has been cut off in the transcript anyway. Basic was never built for her month; Pro's 1,200 minutes and 90-minute cap were.

The per-conversation cap

Each plan caps a single conversation: 30 minutes on Basic, 90 minutes on Pro, 4 hours on Business and Enterprise. This is separate from the monthly pool.

Pro's 90-minute cap is the one to think about. A 60-minute weekly team meeting is fine. A two-hour workshop, a half-day training or a long customer visit isn't, and the transcript stops where the cap does. If you have even one meeting a month that runs past 90 minutes, that alone pushes you to Business.

Imports are counted separately from recordings

Otter's table has two rows that look alike. "Meeting & recording transcription monthly limit" covers meetings the notetaker joins and recordings you make in the app. "Imported file transcription monthly limit" covers audio or video files you upload.

On Basic and Pro, both rows show the same number and a footnote, "shared pool across all transcription types", so a 45-minute uploaded file takes 45 minutes from your 300 or 1,200. On Business, in-app recording is unlimited but imports are capped at 6,000 minutes a month.

Then there's the count of files, which is separate again: three for the life of a Basic account, 10 a month on Pro, unlimited on Business. If you record on a dictaphone and upload afterwards, or you receive recordings from colleagues, Pro's 10 files a month runs out faster than its minutes.

Six languages, and translation only through chat

Otter's pricing table lists "AI transcription in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese". Its supported languages article is blunter: "Otter currently only supports English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese (Simplified)". Asked about Portuguese, the FAQ answer is "No."

Translation exists, but as a prompt: "You can translate your conversations into other languages using Otter Chat." The transcript itself is produced in the language spoken. If your meetings happen in Portuguese, Hindi, Arabic, Italian or Dutch, no Otter plan changes that, so check the list before you check the prices.

The notetaker joins as a participant, and only calendar meetings

This is the limit that matters most if your meetings aren't on a screen. Otter's Notetaker overview says the notetaker "will join your Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams meetings as a participant", with a display name of "[Your Name]'s Notetaker (Otter.ai)". Everyone on the call sees it.

To send it automatically, you connect a Google or Microsoft calendar. Otter's auto-join article is clear about the boundary: "Meetings need to be created either in your calendar or Zoom and be synced over for Notetaker to join." You can also set it to join only meetings you pick by hand.

A conversation across a table has no link for a notetaker to join. For those, Otter's homepage points to recording "from your device": the Mac and Windows desktop apps, the Chrome extension, or the phone apps. That works, but it's a different product experience from the one the plans are built around, and it's the reason the last section of this article exists.

Seats and small print

A few smaller lines that decide the real bill:

• Basic and Pro workspaces hold five members. Business holds 25 billed users. A team of eight is a Business team
• Per-user pricing multiplies. Pro for four people on monthly billing is $67.96 a month, not $16.99
• The Business "$24" is a first-time-subscriber promo for three months, after which the card price is $30
• CRM sync is metered by users: one on Pro, five on Business, unlimited on Enterprise

If you already know your month is mostly face to face, you can skip ahead and try ParrotNotes free on the next meeting that has no video link. Otherwise, the worksheet below settles which Otter plan fits.

Which Otter.ai plan suits you? A plan-picker worksheet

Nobody can pick your plan from a features list. You can pick it in five minutes from four numbers. Grab last month's calendar and fill in the lines.

Line 1: Minutes of meetings you'd want notes from, per month. Count the meetings, multiply by their typical length. Include calls, in-person meetings and anything you'd record. Write the total: ______ minutes.

Line 2: Your longest single meeting in a normal month. Not the average, the longest. Write it: ______ minutes.

Line 3: Files you'd upload for transcription, per month. Voice-memo recordings, dictaphone files, recordings a colleague sends you. Write the count: ______ files, and their total length: ______ minutes.

Line 4: Languages spoken in those meetings. List them: ______________.

Line 5: How many of those meetings have a Zoom, Teams or Meet link? Write it as a share: ______ %.

Now read the results, top to bottom, and stop at the first line that applies.

Then two multipliers:

• People. Multiply the plan price by the number of users. If that number is over five, you're on Business regardless of minutes
• Billing. If you'll still be using it in a year, annual billing is the price Otter advertises. If you're not sure, budget the monthly figure, and remember the plan cards default to the Annual tab

All prices checked on 2026-09-22.

What Otter.ai costs per month: two worked examples

Two fictional people, one worksheet each. The arithmetic uses Otter's published prices only.

Maya: a remote account manager on video calls all day

Maya runs 30 customer calls a month on Zoom and Google Meet, averaging 45 minutes, plus a weekly 75-minute internal pipeline review. She never uploads files and speaks English on every call.

• Line 1: 30 × 45 = 1,350 minutes, plus 4 × 75 = 300, so 1,650 minutes
• Line 2: 75 minutes
• Line 3: 0 files
• Line 4: English
• Line 5: 100% on a video link

Otter suits her month well: everything has a link for the notetaker to join. The 75-minute reviews sit inside Pro's 90-minute cap, but 1,650 minutes is over Pro's 1,200. That's the "over 1,200" line, so Maya is a Business customer.

• Monthly billing: $30 a month, $360 a year
• Annual billing: $19.99 a month, $239.88 a year
• Annual saving: $120.12

If Maya could trim to under 1,200 minutes (say, by not recording the internal review), Pro annual would cost her $99.96 a year. Otter's own plan structure rewards her for counting first.

Dev: a field rep who records debriefs in the car

Dev makes six customer visits a day, four days a week. After each visit he records a 5-minute spoken debrief in the car: what was agreed, who decides, what he promised to send. Two visits a week are with a distributor whose team speaks Spanish, and one visit a month is a 2-hour site walk he'd like recorded in full. Nothing in his month has a video link.

• Line 1: 24 visits a week × 4 weeks × 5 minutes = 480 minutes, plus one 120-minute site walk, so 600 minutes
• Line 2: 120 minutes
• Line 3: 0 files (he records in the app)
• Line 4: English and Spanish
• Line 5: 0% on a video link

Run it through the table. Spanish is on Otter's list, so line 4 passes. But line 5 is 0%, which is the "read the next section" row, and his 120-minute site walk is over Pro's 90-minute cap, which would mean Business at $30 a month for a notetaker that never has a meeting to join.

On Otter, Dev would record every debrief by hand in the phone app, with the same 600 minutes counting against Pro's 1,200, and split his site walk in two. The plan works; it's the shape of the product that doesn't match his day.

Want to try the phone-first version of Dev's month? Download ParrotNotes free and record tomorrow's first debrief.

If you mostly meet in person or need other languages

Otter is built around scheduled video calls: a calendar, a link, a notetaker that joins as a participant. If that's your working week, the plan-picker above will land you on the right tier.

If your week looks like Dev's, the question isn't which Otter plan. It's whether an app built around your phone fits better. That's what ParrotNotes is for, so here are its plan facts on the same terms as Otter's, from parrotnotes.app/pricing on 2026-09-22.

ParrotNotes Free ($0). 100 minutes of recording a month, up to 30 minutes per recording, an AI summary on every recording, and AI insights (action items, key points, sales frameworks) on 5 recordings a month. Unlimited written notes, labels and search, and 3 file imports a month.

ParrotNotes Pro ($19.99 a month, or $14.99 a month billed annually). 3,000 minutes of recording a month (50 hours), recordings up to 3 hours, unlimited AI-powered recordings with summaries, action items, AI chat and the BANT, MEDDIC and SPIN sales frameworks. Multilingual transcription in 99+ languages with translation, so a Spanish visit can come back as an English transcript. Speaker identification, unlimited imports, MCP connectors for Claude and ChatGPT, and no ads, on iOS, Android and macOS. Prices checked on 2026-09-22.

There's no bot. You tap record, put the phone on the table or in your pocket, and recording carries on with the screen locked. When you stop, you get the transcript, the summary, your action items and a drafted follow-up email, ready before you start the car.

Here's how the two line up on the things that decide Dev's month.

Otter facts from otter.ai/pricing and its help centre; ParrotNotes facts from parrotnotes.app/pricing. All checked on 2026-09-22.

Run Dev's month on ParrotNotes and it's simpler. His 600 minutes fit inside Pro's 3,000, the 2-hour site walk fits in one recording, and the Spanish distributor visits come back as English transcripts without a prompt. Pro is $14.99 a month billed annually, or $19.99 month to month.

Maya should probably stay with Otter Business: her month is a calendar full of links, and a notetaker that joins them is exactly the job. The right answer depends on where your meetings happen, which is why our roundup of the best AI note-taking apps starts with a one-week audit of your conversations rather than a features grid.

The bottom line on Otter AI pricing

Otter AI pricing is four plans and two tabs. Basic is free and worth trying. Pro at $16.99 a month ($8.33 billed annually) fits an individual with under 1,200 minutes and no meeting over 90 minutes.

Business at $30 a month ($19.99 billed annually) removes the recording cap and fits teams of up to 25. Enterprise is a sales conversation, and so is Otter's sales notetaker.

Before you buy, fill in the five lines of the worksheet. Minutes, longest meeting, uploads, languages and the share of your meetings with a video link decide the plan faster than any review, including this one. Then check Otter's page on the day, because prices move and this article won't move with them.

And if your fifth line came out low, if most of your conversations happen with no link to join, download ParrotNotes free. You get 100 minutes a month with an AI summary on every recording, on the phone you already carry, and you'll know within a week whether it fits the way you meet.