How much does an AI notetaker cost?
Most AI notetakers charge per user per month, with published 2026 plans commonly landing between roughly $9 and $30 per seat on paid tiers and free tiers capped by minutes or lifetime notes. Usage-priced and self-hosted alternatives cost by meeting hours instead, which changes the maths as headcount grows.
The seat model and where it breaks
Per-seat pricing is simple to buy and simple to over-buy. It charges for the sales rep who lives in calls and the engineer who attends one review a fortnight at the same rate, and the bill grows on hiring days rather than on busy weeks. It is genuinely good value for a small team that meets constantly, and genuinely expensive for a large team where a minority of people take most of the meetings. Free tiers are structured to make this visible quickly: caps arrive as monthly minutes, lifetime note counts, or short retention windows.
Usage pricing, and what a credit actually buys
Usage models bill for what ran: minutes transcribed and reports generated. Donna on the hosted service is metered in credits from a wallet shared across Flocci products, with a monthly free allowance plus one-time credits when you first sign in, and packs bought in rupees when you need more. The practical difference is that a quiet fortnight costs almost nothing and a new teammate costs nothing at all until they actually meet.
Self-hosting: cheaper at scale, not free
Running the software yourself replaces the subscription with three direct costs: a modest always-on server, metered speech recognition per audio hour, and metered analysis per report. No GPU is required, because the models are reached over API with keys you hold. For a fifteen-person team that meets heavily, this is usually the cheapest structure available — and the reason to choose it is normally custody rather than price, with the cost outcome as the bonus.
Related questions
Is there a genuinely free way to use Donna?
The hosted service starts with a one-time credit grant plus a monthly free allowance, so light use can stay inside it. Beyond that you buy credit packs — there is no seat licence to buy first.
Do I pay per participant in a meeting?
No. Donna meters the work — minutes transcribed and reports produced — so a ten-person meeting and a two-person meeting of the same length cost the same.
What does a re-analysis cost?
Re-reading a stored meeting through a different lens generates a new report and is billed as one, since it runs the analysis pass again. It does not re-transcribe anything, so it costs less than the original run.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Access is open — sign in with your Google account and she’s in your dashboard in minutes. Rolling out to a whole team, or want a hand with the server setup? We’re glad to help.