Otter.ai: How to Get the Most From the Free Basic Plan

Free plans usually fail in the same way. They work beautifully for a fortnight, you build a habit around them, and then somewhere in week three the thing quietly stops working and you have no idea why.

Otter's free tier is more generous than most and better documented than most, which means you can plan around it instead of discovering the walls by walking into them. Here is where every wall actually sits.

What do you get on the Otter free plan?

300 transcription minutes per month, a 30 minute limit on any single conversation, and three file imports total for the account. Those three numbers come straight from Otter's help page on Basic plan limits and are confirmed on their pricing comparison table.

What you do get is not trivial. Otter's Basic plan card lists joining Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, AI Chat within and across meetings, live transcription, speaker identification, audio playback, multi-language support and the iOS and Android apps. That is a real product, not a demo.

How far do 300 minutes actually go?

Five hours. If you take four half hour calls a week, you have spent your month by the end of week three. Otter states plainly that when you exceed the transcription limit you cannot record or import until the next monthly cycle begins.

The minutes also do not roll over. Otter's pricing table marks the monthly transcription limit as no rollover, and describes it as a shared pool across transcription types, so recorded meetings and imported files draw from the same 300.

This is why the single most useful thing you can do on the free plan is turn off blanket auto-join. Otter lets you set the default so the notetaker only attends meetings you select individually, which turns 300 minutes from a budget you burn passively into one you spend on purpose.

What happens when a meeting runs past 30 minutes?

It does not stop, and that is the confusing part. Otter documents that on Basic your recording or import will keep going past the 30 minute limit, but you will only be able to access the first 30 minutes of the transcription.

The rest exists and stays locked. If you later upgrade, Otter says the full transcription becomes available from a control at the bottom of the transcript. So a long call is not lost, it is deferred.

• Book meetings at 30 minutes. Not a trick, just the shape the plan is designed around, and a decent constraint for most calls anyway.
• Record the important half. For a longer session, send the notetaker in for the decision part rather than the whole thing.
• Spend imports carefully. Three file imports is a lifetime allowance for the account, so do not use one testing the feature.
• Export as you go. Only your 25 most recent conversations stay visible. Older ones are archived rather than deleted, but pulling out a TXT copy of anything that matters costs nothing.

That last point pairs with the export limits. On Basic, Otter's export documentation says text comes out as TXT only, and the pricing table lists mp3 and txt as the available formats. DOCX, PDF and SRT captions are paid plan features.

Which limits catch people out?

The minute count gets all the attention, but three quieter caps cause more day to day friction than the 300.

First, concurrent meetings. Otter's pricing table lists one concurrent meeting on Basic. If two calls overlap and you cannot attend both, only one of them gets captured, which is precisely the situation where you most wanted a notetaker.

Second, AI Chat. Twenty queries per user per month with a limit of three per conversation is enough to try the feature, not enough to build a habit on it. Write your prompt properly the first time rather than refining your way toward an answer.

Third, custom vocabulary. Five terms is the whole allowance on Basic, so spend them on the words that appear in every single call: your company name, your product name, and the acronym your industry cannot get through a sentence without.

When is it worth paying, and what does it cost?

The honest trigger is not the 300 minutes, it is the 30 minute conversation cap. If your normal meeting runs an hour, the free plan is capturing half of your working life and you will feel it within a fortnight.

On Otter's pricing page, read on 17 August 2026 with the annual billing option selected, Pro is listed at $8.33 per user per month and Business at $19.99 per user per month. The page marks the annual option as the discounted one, so monthly billing costs more.

If you are a student or a teacher, there is a documented discount worth knowing about. Otter's pricing page describes a 20 percent discount on Pro for individuals using an email address ending in .edu, listing Pro Annual at $6.67 per month billed $79.99 annually and Pro Monthly at $13.59 per month, read on 17 August 2026. You sign up or sign in with the .edu address, click your name in the top left, open the upgrade plan link, and follow the student and teacher discount link under the Pro description.

A note on recording other people

Free or paid, the same obligation applies. Recording rules differ by country and in some places by state, and the responsibility sits with the person doing the recording rather than with the tool. Otter's own guidance is to obtain consent and follow your local laws.

In practice this is easy, because Otter's notetaker joins as a visible participant rather than silently. Say at the start of the call that it is there and offer to remove it. Ten seconds of housekeeping avoids a genuinely bad conversation later.

What a minute budget is really measuring

Step back and look at what you have been optimising. You rationed transcription minutes, chose which calls deserved a record, exported the good ones before they scrolled out of history, and kept an eye on a query counter. All of that effort went into producing better notes.

Notes are not the reason anyone records a meeting. The reason is that something has to happen afterwards. That is what we built Sistava around: rather than budgeting capture and then working the output by hand, you hire an AI Employee and tell it in plain English what to handle after a call. It sends the recap, updates the record, and chases the thing you promised, asking you when it is unsure.

That said, Otter's free tier is a fair offer, and unusually clear about its own edges. Three hundred minutes, a thirty minute cap and three imports, published plainly in their help centre rather than buried. If a searchable record of your most important calls is what you need, it will genuinely do that for nothing.

Sources

• Otter.ai Help Center, Conversation, import, and app limits on the Basic free plan
• Otter.ai, Pricing, plan comparison table and student discount notes read on 17 August 2026
• Otter.ai Help Center, Export conversations
• Otter.ai Help Center, Choose which meetings Otter Notetaker records
• Otter.ai Help Center, Otter Notetaker Overview, including its recording consent guidance
• Unkoa, Otter.ai Free Plan Limits, an independent summary of the caps
• tl;dv, Otter.ai Pricing, an independent review of the plan tiers