Fathom

Read and saved on 11 October 2026 for this card: Fathom's Terms of Service and four other legal documents, 41 help-centre pages, the developer FAQ, the pricing page before and after its billing toggle was pressed, the G2 and Trustpilot records, and public Reddit threads. Every clause and quotation below was re-opened in its saved copy before printing. Capterra blocked the request and Fathom's trust centre loads as an empty script shell, so neither was read. The product was never installed and no meeting was recorded for this card: it is document work, collected, dated and reconciled by Minel Gunesoglu, founder of Vouch. The about page says what this desk does and does not do.

Fathom's pricing page prints three words under every plan card, the free one included: "90 day guarantee". Fathom's Terms of Service, which carry the date March 4, 2026, say in section 5: "All fees are non-refundable exclusive of any applicable taxes, which you are responsible for." The two documents point at each other without settling it: section 1 of the Terms sends readers to the pricing page ("See a comparison of these offerings"), and the pricing page's footer links back to the Terms of Service. The pricing page does not say what is guaranteed, and the Terms do not contain the word guarantee.

That is why this review starts with what Fathom itself has published and only then moves to the score and the customer record.

What Is Fathom AI Notetaker, and Is It Fathom Analytics or Fathom Video?

Fathom, as reviewed here, is the meeting notetaker sold at fathom.ai by Fathom Video Inc. Fathom Analytics, Fathom Health and Fathom Realty are unrelated businesses, and nothing on this page describes them. Fathom Video is the same product under its older domain: the help centre still lives at help.fathom.video, and the Terms open by naming "Fathom Video Inc." as the party offering the service.

Section 1 of the Terms describes tools for Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams "and other compatible third-party conferencing applications". Fathom's device help article, captured 11 October 2026, sets the limits: "Fathom is currently able to record meetings on Mac and Windows computers." It lists Chromebooks, Linux computers, tablets, webinars and breakout rooms as unsupported, along with "Phone calls such as Zoom phone calls". An iOS app records in-person conversations; its help article says "The app is iOS only (not available on Android)" and lists "Phone calls cannot be recorded" among its limitations at launch. Both help pages show the word "Edited" and no date, so the reading date is the capture date.

How Much Does Fathom AI Cost Per Month? Both Billing Views, Read 11 October 2026

Fathom's pricing page opens with its billing toggle set to "Annually (save 25%+)", so the first figures a visitor sees are the annual-billing ones. Pressing the toggle gives the monthly-billing figures.

Source for every cell: fathom.ai/pricing, read in a rendered browser on 11 October 2026. One limit: the Premium annual figure of $16 was taken from the page's own price element, which the markup labels "is-yearly", and from the page text. It was not seen rendered in the annual position.

By this desk's own arithmetic on those cells, Premium's annual figure is 20% under its monthly one, Team's about 21% and Business's about 26%.

Premium is the lowest tier one person can buy. Team is priced lower per seat, but the card reads "(2 user min)", so its smallest monthly bill is $38. The score card further down prices Premium at $20, the monthly view.

Is Fathom AI Free to Use? Unlimited Recording and a 5-Call Summary Cap

Fathom has a free plan, and the pricing page describes it as "Free forever." with "Unlimited recordings + transcriptions". A second Fathom document narrows that line. The help article that sets Free beside Premium, captured 11 October 2026, reads: "Free: Advanced summaries for your first 5 calls each month (after that, only the General/Enhanced template will be available)".

New accounts also begin with a preview of Premium features, which the same article says go away "once your free preview ends (30 days after sign-up)". A reader who stays on Free is using a narrower product from day 31.

What Are the Differences Between Fathom's Free and Paid Versions?

Beyond the summary cap, one line of Fathom's Free and Premium help article covers both individual plans: "Free and Premium: CRM sync (HubSpot, Salesforce, Close) for up to 3 users per email domain, personal-use Zapier integration". API access is not a paid feature: the developer FAQ, captured 11 October 2026, says keys and webhooks are "included on all plans".

The Terms hold differences the pricing page does not show. Section 2 grants its licence "solely for your personal or internal business use" and draws no line between editions, so business use is permitted on the free plan. Section 1 then says: "If you are using the free edition of the Service, Fathom is not obligated to provide any indemnities or warranties in Sections 12 and 13". The user's own promise to indemnify Fathom, in section 12, carries no such exception; both directions are set out in the score section below. Section 1 also lets Fathom end a free account at any time.

Does Fathom's 90 Day Guarantee Mean a Refund? What the Terms and Help Centre Say

Fathom's documents, as captured on 11 October 2026, do not say that the 90 day guarantee is a refund.

• The pricing page shows "90 day guarantee" on the Free, Premium, Team, Business and Enterprise cards. The words refund and money back do not appear on that page.
• The Terms contain the string refund once, inside the section 5 sentence quoted at the top of this page.
• Across 41 captured help-centre pages, refund appears once, in an article about impostor apps. No captured legal or help document uses the phrase 90 day guarantee.

What the Terms do give is a way to stop paying. Section 5 says: "You may cancel your subscription, without penalty or obligation, at any time prior to the applicable monthly renewal date."

Whether Fathom treats the guarantee as a refund in practice is outside what this page read. Section 16 of the Terms folds in "any Additional Terms" that Fathom may post on or link from the service, which the same section says are "incorporated by this reference into, and made a part of, these Terms"; none defining the guarantee was found in what was captured. A buyer relying on those three words should ask Fathom in writing what they cover.

Who Owns the Notes Fathom AI Generates? What the Terms Say and Do Not Say

Fathom's Terms say who owns what a user records. They do not state who owns the transcript and summary Fathom generates from it, and the clauses that come near the question point in different directions.

On recordings, section 4 says a personal account holder keeps "any copyright and other proprietary rights that you may have in your User Content". For a team seat the answer changes: "the User Content in that Team Account belongs to your company".

On generated notes, four passages of the Terms dated March 4, 2026 touch the subject:

• Section 3, headed "DATA OWNERSHIP", says: "All Materials included in the Service are the property of Fathom or our third-party licensors". It defines Materials as the "visual interfaces, graphics, design, compilation, information, data, computer code (including source code or object code), products, software, services, and all other elements of the Service" that Fathom provides.
• Section 2 forbids a user to "store, copy, modify, distribute, or resell any of the information, audio, visual, and audiovisual works, or other content made available by us through the Service".
• Section 2 also forbids a user to "make the Service or content generated by Service available to anyone other than the members of your Team Account".
• Section 4's Confidentiality paragraph says of a user's non-public business information that "any recordings or other embodiments of that information created using the Service is your “Confidential Information”".

None of those passages says who owns a generated transcript or summary, and the Terms do not say whether a summary is Materials, content made available by Fathom, or User Content. A string search of the saved Terms found output, deriv and the whole word note zero times; transcri once, in section 1, about what conferencing tools can do; and summar once, in section 16, about section headers.

The finding is that ownership of generated notes is not stated. It is a finding about one document on one date, not a claim that Fathom asserts ownership of anyone's notes; a Fathom help article says, in the vendor's voice, "We don't think your calls belong to us."

How Long Does Fathom Keep a Deleted Recording, Seven Days or Thirty?

Fathom gives two figures in two documents. The security help article, captured 11 October 2026, says of account deletion: "After an additional 7 days, all data is also removed from our backups." Section 4 of the Terms says "copies of your User Content may persist in database backups for up to 30 days".

The help article covers deleting a whole account, and the Terms clause covers any deletion request. The Terms call themselves "a legally binding contract between you and Fathom", and the figure they give is 30. Anyone with a deletion deadline of their own should plan around the longer number.

Can You Export Your Calls if You Leave Fathom? No Bulk Endpoint, One Email Per Account

Fathom publishes several ways to take material out and none that takes a whole library out in one step. Its developer FAQ, captured 11 October 2026, holds all three of these:

• On formats: "Summaries from both the API and webhooks are Markdown-formatted only."
• On recordings, under the question "Can I download video or audio recordings via the API?", the answer begins: "Yes. Call POST /recordings/{recording_id}/download to start generating a downloadable file". That is one request per recording.
• On volume: "There is no bulk endpoint; pagination is the way to retrieve large sets."

The pricing page's feature table, read the same day, lists "Call downloads and clips (unlimited)"; the saved text does not show which plan columns carry that line. Among the 41 captured help-centre pages, no help page describes a library export.

A Trustpilot reviewer on the Business plan described the gap on 9 April 2026: "there is no bulk download feature. If you want to leave Fathom, you have to download every single call recording individually." That is one reviewer's account, posted on Fathom's Trustpilot profile, and Fathom replied on the card the next day.

The Terms add a second constraint. Section 4 says "the User Content in your account is tied to a specific email address used to create the account and cannot be transferred to another account". A Fathom help article also says "Your meeting data is portable. You can connect it to ChatGPT, Claude, and other MCP integrations without us gating it." Both can hold at once: data an assistant can query is a different thing from a library that downloads in one step.

Who Owns Fathom AI Now? Fathom Video Inc., Superhuman and the Dated Mismatch

Fathom announced on September 14, 2026, on its own site and under its chief executive's name, that "Fathom is now part of Superhuman". TechCrunch reported the acquisition the same day; the captured article gives no purchase price. G2's listing, read 11 October 2026, shows "By Superhuman" under the product name.

The legal documents captured on 11 October 2026 had not followed. The Terms of Service (March 4, 2026), the Data Processing Agreement (May 5, 2026), the Privacy Policy and Biometric Information Notice (both August 16, 2026) and the Business Associate Agreement (September 9, 2026) were each searched for the word Superhuman, and it appears in none of them. Each of the five names Fathom Video Inc.

Fathom's announcement says: "Nothing changes today for Fathom users. Same app, same login, same product experience." That sentence is about the product on the day of the announcement. Section 16 of the Terms says: "We may assign these Terms at any time without notice or consent." That sentence is a standing permission in a contract dated March 4, 2026. Together they show that the Terms allow the contracting party to change without notice. They do not show that any assignment has happened or is planned.

What Does Fathom's 78.9 Score Rest On, and What Is a Delivery Envelope?

Fathom's four rows run from 66.0 to 99.7. The price row is at the bottom and the customer row at the top.

The first row is not a measure of output quality. Delivery envelope asks what a buyer on the first paid plan can carry out of the product, and it rests on three published positions: the formats that come out, the documented API, and the devices the product runs on. The 92 and the 88 measure formats and a documented API. They do not measure how easy it is to take a whole library out, which the export section above reports separately.

No accuracy figure appears on this page. A per-product accuracy table held on file was published by MeetMemo, a company that sells one of the products in its own table, so it is not scored and this page prints none of that study's figures. The 78.9 therefore describes delivery, customer ratings, price and contract terms, and says nothing about the quality of the notes. The methodology page explains how the rows combine.

The customer row pools 7,359 ratings from two platforms, and on neither is it known how reviewers were recruited; the card prints that as a flag. G2's first page shows ten reviews, each labelled "Organic", which describes ten of 7,073.

The commercial-terms row reads clauses and stops there. Section 12 of the Terms runs in both directions.

• The user's promise. Section 12 says "you will defend and indemnify Fathom", with its affiliates and their people, "from and against every claim brought by a third party". The listed grounds include "(c) your violation of any third-party right, including any intellectual property right or publicity, confidentiality, other property, or privacy right" and "(e) any dispute or issue between you and a third party". No edition is excepted.
• The vendor's promise. Fathom indemnifies the user against a third-party claim "alleging that your use of the Service infringes or misappropriates any patent, copyright, or trademark". It applies if the user gives prompt written notice, hands Fathom control of the defence and assists when reasonably asked, and it excludes use outside the licence, a failure to follow Fathom's instructions and unauthorised modification. The clause does not exclude a user's own content in so many words. This card reads it as a promise about the service all the same, because ground (c) above and a sentence in section 4 ("We will not be responsible for any User Content") put claims about recorded content on the user. That is the narrower of two available readings. Read without that limit the indemnity line inside that row would score 100 in place of 82, which by this page's own arithmetic would lift the overall figure by about 1.7 points.
• The free-edition carve-out. Section 1 removes the vendor's promise from the free plan, and section 12 repeats it: "Fathom’s indemnity obligations of this Section do not apply to the free edition of our Service."
• The cap. Section 14 limits Fathom's total liability to "THE GREATER OF (I) US$100 AND (II) THE AMOUNT PAID BY YOU OR PAYABLE BY YOU UNDER THESE TERMS DURING THE 12-MONTH PERIOD" before a claim, and states no exception for section 12.

The row records what the documents commit to on a stated date, not whether the commitments are kept.

Is Fathom AI Trustworthy? Ratings With Their Sample Sizes, and What Low-Star Reviews Report

Fathom's ratings and Fathom's written complaints measure different things, and a fair answer needs both.

The ratings, read in a rendered browser on 11 October 2026: G2 shows 5/5 across 7,073 reviews, and Trustpilot shows 4.8 across 286, with 93% of them five-star. No G2 review text was read for this card, so the 7,073 enter as a count. G2's page data carries the rating as 5.0, to one decimal place, so the 5/5 is a displayed figure whose underlying mean is not published to a second place. Trustpilot's profile adds two statements of its own: "This company hasn't invited customers recently, so reviews may not be representative" and "Replied to 87% of negative reviews".

The complaints: fourteen of the 286 Trustpilot reviews are rated one to three stars. Nine were transcribed for this card, one of which does not identify a notetaker and is not used; five were only listed; and the four- and five-star reviews were not transcribed at all. What follows is a reading of the dissatisfied minority. Each account is one reviewer's, none was verified by this desk, and all sit on the filtered Trustpilot page.

• Support. A two-star reviewer wrote on 14 August 2026: "And the best that I can get from their company is we might email you back tomorrow." Fathom's reply on that card, dated Aug 16, 2026, begins: "Thank you for being with us all these years, and we're sorry we let you down here." Against that, an r/msp commenter wrote on 10 May 2025: "I've found them to be very responsive." Different customers, fifteen months apart.
• Joining calls. A three-star reviewer wrote on 21 March 2026 that "Two crucial client meetings were missed". Part of this can sit with the meeting platform's settings and not with Fathom: one poster on r/sysadmin, describing their own tenant setting, wrote on 8 December 2025: "Since I turned on captcha, we've blocked Fathom and just about everyone else". A missed meeting in a review cannot be sorted into tenant policy or product fault from outside.
• Not being told. These are two different kinds of account. A one-star reviewer wrote on 18 February 2026: "I entried into a video conference today and nobody advised me that this app was running." That reviewer writes as someone who joined a call and does not say whether they hold a Fathom account. A one-star reviewer of 14 December 2025 writes as an account holder ("I installed Fathom believing it was a simple note-taking tool") and reports: "The software recorded one of my online meetings without my knowledge or consent". The consent-email rule in the next section is about guests, so it does not explain the account holder's report.

Reddit praise for Fathom exists and is specific, but the captured threads also hold posts sharing referral links for free Premium time, so it is not treated here as a neutral sample.

Does Fathom AI Need Every Guest's Consent to Record, and What if the Consent Email Goes Unanswered?

Fathom's consent help article, captured 11 October 2026, says: "In some jurisdictions, recording without permission can even be illegal." It then tells users to consult a lawyer. That is the vendor's statement, and this page adds nothing to it about what any law requires.

The same article limits when a consent email goes out at all. The meeting must be external and scheduled, and the setting must be switched on. For bot-based meetings the Fathom user must also be the host, and "The number of guest attendees is exactly 1". On timing: "Fathom does not send consent emails for same-day meetings."

On silence, the article says: "If we don’t receive a response to the consent email, Fathom will still join and capture the call as normal." It continues: "Attendees can always choose to remove the bot from the meeting at any time." If a guest declines in advance, the article says auto-record is disabled for that call.

Fathom's documents put consent on the recording owner. The help article says: "It is the recording owner’s responsibility to make sure all participants have given consent to be recorded." The Terms forbid a user to "use the Service if any participant on your call does not consent to be recorded", and section 4 has the user warrant that "you have obtained the required consent of every meeting participant to record each call before the call begins and obtained any other legally required consents." Behind that warranty sits ground (c) of the user's indemnity in section 12, quoted in the score section: a user's violation of any third-party right, privacy rights included. That is what the Terms say; how any of it would apply to a given recording is not something this page judges.

The question is not particular to Fathom. A poster on r/executivecoaching wrote on 9 September 2026: "A lot of coaches now have Otter or Fathom or Zoom's AI sitting in every session." Whether and how to ask is a question for every product that records a meeting, and for the person who switches it on.

Is Fathom AI Safe, and Where Does Your Data Go? Storage, AI Training and Compliance in Fathom's Words

Everything in this section is Fathom's own wording, read on 11 October 2026. None of it was checked against the product.

On storage, the security help article says: "All Fathom data is stored in the United States." The Privacy Policy, which carries "Last Updated: August 16, 2026", says the service is "hosted in the United States", and its next paragraph adds: "we may transfer your personal information from the U.S. to other countries or regions in connection with storage and processing of data".

On AI training, the help article asks "Do you train AI models on customer data?" and answers in two consecutive sentences. The first: "No! None of our AI sub-processors (Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google) are contractually permitted to use our users’ data to train their AI models." The second: "Fathom uses de-identified customer data to improve the accuracy of our proprietary AI models in order to improve our service for all users." Section 4 of the Terms carries the same two positions and gives the opt-out: "You can opt out of the use of your de-identified data in this manner within your Fathom account settings."

On compliance, the help article opens: "Fathom is HIPAA, SOC2 Type II, and GDPR-compliant and has passed extensive security reviews by Zoom." A later answer reads: "We don’t have ISO27001, but we do have SOC2, which is similar!" Those are the vendor's sentences. The trust centre they point to reached this desk as a script-rendered shell with no readable text, so no audit report or certificate was read for this card.

Fathom AI Alternatives: Who Fathom and TechCrunch Name, No Ranking

Fireflies.ai has a card on this site, built from its own Terms, pricing page and platform records read on 22 and 23 September 2026.

Granola, Read AI and Wispr are the startups TechCrunch's 14 September 2026 report on the Superhuman deal names in the same market, saying they "have raised millions of dollars to aid that growth".

Fathom publishes its own list. The footer of its Terms page, captured 11 October 2026, carries a Competitors menu that names Fireflies, Granola, Gong, Otter, Read AI, ZoomMate and Google Meet's Gemini. Nothing was read from those pages for this card.

Scored notetakers are listed together on the AI note takers page, in the order their scores produce.

Is Fathom AI Worth It? Three Things to Get From Fathom in Writing Before Paying

Fathom's documents leave three points open, and one email to the vendor can close each of them before any money moves.

1. The guarantee. The pricing page prints "90 day guarantee" on every card and section 5 of the Terms says fees are non-refundable. Ask whether the guarantee is a refund, on which plans, and whether it applies under annual billing as well as monthly.
2. The generated notes. The Terms assign User Content and never say who owns the transcripts and summaries Fathom produces. Ask whether a summary is User Content, and on a team seat whether it belongs to the company as the recordings do.
3. The contracting party. Every legal document captured on 11 October 2026 names Fathom Video Inc., the sale to Superhuman was announced on 14 September 2026, and section 16 allows assignment without notice. Ask which entity the contract is with today, and keep the reply.

One thing no document settles, and this desk did not settle either: how accurate the notes are. No accuracy measure sits behind this score, and no trial was run here.

The 78.9 on Fathom's card describes a price, a contract, what the paid tier hands over and 7,359 ratings whose recruitment is unknown. Author profile: Minel Gunesoglu on LinkedIn.