Otter.ai. $30/user/mo.
The pitch: the AI notetaker. Otter’s bot joins your Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet calls, transcribes everyone live, identifies each speaker by name, and hands back an automated summary with action items and an outline. Ask questions about any meeting in AI Chat. Sync the notes into Salesforce or HubSpot. Basic is free with 300 transcription minutes a month and a 30-minute ceiling on any one conversation. Pro is $16.99 a month per user billed monthly, or $8.33 a month if you pay for the year, and lifts you to 1,200 minutes and 90-minute meetings. Business is $30 a month per user, $19.99 a month on annual billing, and that’s where unlimited meetings and four-hour calls start.
The reality: the transcript stopped being the expensive part. A recorded hour of audio costs $0.36 to turn into text at OpenAI’s published whisper-1 rate of $0.006 a minute. Zoom records the call to your own computer, and your phone handles the meetings you take in person. So what you’re renting for $30 a user a month is the write-up, and the write-up is the part a saved Claude skill does better, because it writes in your format instead of Otter’s: the decisions, who owns what by Friday, the follow-up email already drafted, the three things the buyer said about price. Point a scheduled Cowork task at the folder where your transcripts land and it reads the whole month at once. Otter meters that same question. You get 20 AI Chat queries a month on the free plan, 50 on Pro, 200 on Business, and then you’re done asking about your own calls. Twenty hours of meetings cost you $7.20 in transcription on the $20 a month Claude plan you’re likely already paying for, against $30 a month per seat, $360 a year out of your pocket. Put three people on it and you’re at $1,080.
What Otter still gives you that the free build doesn’t: the bot shows up by itself. Nobody has to remember to hit record, the transcript runs live while the call is happening, Google Meet gets real captions, and the speakers are identified by name instead of you sorting out who said what afterward. That matters when you’re on six calls a day and you didn’t schedule half of them. The Salesforce and HubSpot sync moves notes across without a person in the loop, which is the entire product if you run a sales team. Advanced search across every past conversation by speaker and date range is already built. Business adds bulk export in pdf, docx and srt, and lifts the per-meeting cap to four hours when Pro cuts you off at 90 minutes. If you have reps whose notes have to land in the CRM before they forget, keep it. If you’re one owner on four calls a week, you’re paying $360 a year per seat to summarize a file that’s already sitting on your laptop.
Replacing one Otter Business seat with your own recordings and a saved Claude skill pays for the entire Vault subscription three times over in year one.