Does Otter charge you after the free minutes run out?

No, it won't bill you by surprise. When you hit the monthly minute limit, recording stops until the next cycle or until you choose to upgrade. You have to actively pick a paid plan; nothing charges automatically.

Is Otter free forever?

The free plan doesn't expire, so in that sense yes, it's free forever. The catch is that it's metered, so it's free forever within the monthly minutes and the per-conversation cap, not free for unlimited use.

Does Otter store my recordings?

Yes. Otter is a cloud service, so your audio and transcripts are uploaded to and stored on its servers. That's what makes your notes searchable across devices. For anything confidential, it's worth knowing the recording lives on a third-party server under their retention policy.

What's a free tool with no monthly cap?

Tools that transcribe on your device, in the browser, don't meter minutes because each transcription costs them nothing to run. The tradeoff is they usually skip speaker labels and AI summaries and just give you plain verbatim text. JustWrite works this way.

Is Otter.ai Really Free? (What the Free Plan Actually Gives You)

Short answer: yes, Otter.ai has a genuinely free plan, and you can use it without ever paying. But "free" here means a metered tier with monthly minute limits, a cap on how long a single recording can be, and features held back for the paid plans. Whether it's really free for you depends on how much you record and what you need to do with the text afterward.

What Otter's free plan actually includes

Otter's free tier (called Basic) gives you live recording with automatic transcription, speaker labels so you can see who said what, a short AI summary of each conversation, and a searchable feed of all your notes on both the web and mobile apps. The transcription quality is solid for clear speech.

What it doesn't give you is unlimited use. As of this writing the free plan runs around 300 transcription minutes a month, caps a single conversation at roughly 30 minutes, and limits how many existing audio or video files you can import to a small lifetime number rather than a monthly one. Otter has changed these numbers more than once, so treat them as a guide and check the current pricing page before you rely on them.

So is Otter really free? The honest answer

Yes and no. The account costs nothing and you're not handing over a credit card to start. But the free plan is built to run out. Hit 300 minutes and you wait for the next monthly cycle or you upgrade. Record a 45-minute meeting and it stops you at 30. Try to import a backlog of old recordings and you get a few, then you're done.

So it's free the way a free sample is free: real and useful, but shaped to make the paid plan the obvious next step once you lean on it. That's not a scam, it's a funnel, and it's worth naming plainly so you can decide if the limits fit how you work.

Where the free plan runs out first

Most people hit one of three walls before anything else.

The monthly minute meter is the common one. If you record meetings or interviews regularly, 300 minutes is about five hours, and that goes fast.

The per-conversation cap catches people off guard. A long meeting or a full interview gets cut at the 30-minute mark, so you lose the back half unless you upgrade.

The import limit is the quiet one. If your plan was to feed Otter a pile of recordings you already have, the free tier only lets you import a handful, ever.

On top of those, some ways of getting your transcript out and several of the heavier features sit behind the paid plans.

Does Otter store your recordings?

Yes. Otter is a cloud service, which is how the searchable-across-devices part works. When you record or import, both the audio and the transcript are uploaded to and stored on Otter's servers. For a lot of everyday use that's fine and convenient.

For a private call, a confidential interview, or anything you wouldn't want sitting on someone else's infrastructure, it's worth knowing that "free" cloud transcription means your audio lives on their servers under their retention and data-handling terms. That's a normal tradeoff for cloud tools, just one the marketing rarely puts front and center.

What the free plan is genuinely good at

Credit where it's due. If you want speaker labels, a quick summary, and a tidy searchable archive of your meetings that syncs across your phone and laptop, Otter's free plan does that well, and few free tools match the polish. For someone whose main job is meetings and who's comfortable with cloud storage and the monthly limits, it's a reasonable pick.

The question isn't whether Otter is good. It's whether "free" describes what you actually need, or just the first few hours of it.

If you mostly want unlimited free text

Here's the honest fork. If what you really want is speaker labels, summaries, and an organized meeting archive, a metered cloud tier like Otter's is the right shape and the free plan is a fair place to start.

But if what you want is unlimited transcription with no monthly meter, no per-recording cap, and nothing uploaded, then a cloud tool that has to store and process your audio was never going to give you that for free. The economics don't allow it, which is exactly why the meter exists.

That last case is the whole reason JustWrite works differently: it transcribes on your own device, in the browser, so there's no minute cap and nothing to upload. The tradeoff is honest too, since it gives you plain verbatim text rather than speaker labels or summaries. Different tool for a different need, and worth knowing both exist before you assume "free" has to come with a meter.