Granola

What Granola is

Granola is an AI meeting-notes tool that works differently from the meeting bots: it records your own computer's audio instead of joining the call. No bot joins the call, nothing appears in the attendee list, and nobody is told a note-taker is listening. It replaces two older approaches — a person transcribing manually, or a meeting bot that announces itself to everyone on the call. The output is structured notes built around what you cared about in the meeting, not a raw transcript.

The price of the no-bot design

Because Granola captures your computer's audio, its coverage is limited to what your machine hears. It cannot attend a meeting you skip, it cannot record from a colleague's laptop, and it captures nothing on a phone unless the app is open. A team that wants a bot covering meetings nobody attends is asking for the opposite product. The privacy win — no visible recorder, no "this call is being recorded" moment — and the coverage limit are the same feature, so the decision is which side of it you are on before paying.

There is one more disclosure to know: Enterprise plans include an org-wide setting that notifies people Granola is being used. If the selling point is that nobody knows, note that the largest tier has a setting that tells them.

The workflow starts before the meeting, not during it

Most meeting tools begin recording when the call does. Granola adds a step earlier: connect your calendar, and it drafts a Brief before external meetings — who is attending, what you discussed last time, what matters now. That changes the workflow from capture to prepare: the note is already half-written before anyone speaks, and the meeting itself confirms or corrects it. Two limits matter: Briefs are Business-and-up, not free, and Google Calendar is the supported connection — Microsoft Calendar is not yet supported.

The same design covers meetings that bots cannot reach. Because Granola listens to your device rather than joining a call, it works for in-person conversations — a walking meeting, a coffee chat, a whiteboard session — through the iOS or Android app. Otter and Fireflies are structurally tied to online calls; Granola is the one in this group that follows you out of them. For people whose work happens as much in person as on Zoom, that is the difference between the tool covering their actual day or only the parts of it that happen in a browser.

The free tier counts days, not minutes

Granola gives away unlimited meeting notes — then stops showing them after 30 days. That is a time-based limit in a category full of volume-based ones: Otter caps free use at 300 minutes per month, Fireflies at 400 minutes of storage. Granola lets you record every call and quietly ages your history out.

A 30-day window holds roughly 4.3 weeks of meetings. If you attend 10 meetings a week, about 43 stay visible — and the first week's notes disappear around week five, even though you recorded them on the same free plan. If your use case is notes you can still search three months from now, the free tier does not do that, no matter how many meetings you record. The free tier is a trial of note quality, not a usable archive.

What $14 per month actually buys

Business costs $14 per user per month and removes the history window. Cost per meeting depends entirely on how many you attend:

Meetings per week	Meetings per month (≈4.3×)	Cost per meeting
5	21.5	~$0.67
10	43	~$0.33
15	64.5	~$0.22

Run the same arithmetic against Otter's free tier: 300 minutes per month is roughly ten 30-minute meetings (assuming an average meeting of 30 minutes), after which Otter also asks for money. Granola's free tier is not more generous — it just counts a different unit. The crossover point is about two to three meetings a week: below that, the 30-day window rarely bites; above it, the window starts eating your history, and $14 becomes a question of whether that history is worth $0.22–0.67 a meeting.

Who should use it, and who should not

• Works for: founders, sales and recruiting people whose meetings are client- or candidate-facing, where a visible recording bot changes what people say; anyone who already types their own notes and wants them cleaned up rather than replaced — Granola rewards engaged note-takers, because the notes are shaped around what you cared about.
• Works at these usage levels: roughly 10+ meetings a week with re-reading last month's notes — $14 for unlimited history costs about $0.33 per meeting, cheaper than re-asking a client what was decided.
• Does not work for: people attending two to three meetings a week or fewer who never look back more than a month — the free tier's 30-day window is genuinely enough; teams needing an evidentiary word-for-word transcript, since Granola produces notes, not records; teams that need a bot attending meetings nobody is in, which the no-bot design structurally cannot do.