Fireflies.ai

By Minel Gunesoglu, founder of Vouch. This card is built from documents and platform records, and it was built without installing anything: no meeting was recorded, no transcript was produced, and no sentence below describes how the notes read. Opened on 22 September 2026: Fireflies' Terms of Service and Privacy Policy (both carry their own date, March 6, 2026), its refund policy, its billing FAQ, its download, auto-join and recap-privacy help articles, its API limits page, its desktop page, and its pricing page twice, in the view it loads in and again after pressing its own billing toggle. Opened on 23 September 2026: the Business User Supplemental Terms that Business and Enterprise seats sit under, the security page and the trial help article. Beside those: the G2, Trustpilot, Capterra, Apple App Store, Google Play and Chrome Web Store records; four federal dockets and the complaints behind them on CourtListener; threads on r/sysadmin, r/AIAssisted, r/LovedByCreators and r/cybersecurity, a Microsoft Q&A thread and one public LinkedIn post; and five outside pages that sat on the results for this product's own name, review and pricing queries captured on 21 and 22 September 2026, four of them published by companies selling a competing product. Prices, dockets and ratings are re-read monthly. What this desk does and does not do is set out on the about page.

On 7 October 2025 the person who opened a thread on r/sysadmin about a meeting bot wrote: "Seems like the only way to get it to stop is go to their site and delete the account." Four weeks later, on 4 November 2025, a commenter in a Reddit thread about the same product wrote: "Interesting that Otter still requires manual joining. That's the main reason I moved to Fireflies too."

Both are about one behaviour, and Fireflies documents that behaviour itself. Its help article on auto-join, read on 22 September 2026, says: "By default, Fireflies is set to join all meetings with a web-conf link." A second article says the recap email goes by default to "Everyone on the invite", and that meeting privacy is set by default to "Teammates & Anyone with Link", an option it defines as "Anyone with the recap link can view it, even if they weren't in the meeting (Default)". All three are settings, and the sections below say where each one lives.

What no setting decides is who has to ask the other people on the call. The Terms of Service answer that in section 5(d), and the answer is the account holder whose notetaker is in the meeting. That clause, the price the pricing page does not open on, and four federal complaints about voiceprints, one withdrawn and none decided, in a market where Otter.ai and Granola face privacy suits of their own, are the reasons this page runs long.

What Is Fireflies, Who Is Fred, and Is 'Firefly AI' the Same Product?

Fireflies.ai is meeting software sold by Fireflies.AI Corp. Its Terms of Service open by saying the services are "provided by Fireflies.AI Corp."; the same company appears as "FIREFLIES.AI CORP." in Apple's App Store seller field, as "Fireflies.ai" on Google Play and on the Chrome Web Store, where the developer block gives a Pleasanton, California address. The Terms name Delaware as the governing law.

The product does one job in several places. A bot joins a Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams call, records it, transcribes it and writes a summary. The pricing page lists "Zoom, GMeet, Teams, +more", "Transcription in 100+ languages", a Chrome extension, a desktop app and mobile apps for Android and iOS, plus an assistant it calls "AskFred: AI assistant", which the homepage, read the same day, describes in one line: "Let Fred review your meetings and come back with answers to any question you have." The desktop page, read the same day, advertises a second route under the heading "Botless Meetings, Finally": "Get notes without a bot on the call. Make sure to get consent from all participants. A Fireflies indicator will be present to let participants know when the notetaker is on."

The bot is called Fred, and you can invite fred@fireflies.ai to a meeting. The name predates the software. PC Gamer, on 14 November 2025, reported a LinkedIn post by co-founder Sam Udotong about the company's earliest days, quoting the post: "We'd manually dial in as 'Fred from Fireflies.ai'" and "In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand." The same article quotes readers reacting in both directions, a named software engineer calling the post "one of the most reckless and tone-deaf posts I've seen in a while", another founder calling the story inspirational. That is company history about a period Udotong says ended when they decided to "stop and automate everything". It is not a description of what runs today, and nothing on this page treats it as one.

Two name collisions are worth settling before any figure is read. Google's suggested questions for a search on this product's name, read on 22 September 2026, include "How do I get rid of Firefly AI?", a spelling that also names Adobe Firefly, Adobe's image and video generator and a different product. This page does not say which of the two that question means, and no figure about Adobe's product appears anywhere on it. Separately, the Chrome Web Store carries a second extension called "Fireflies Meeting Joiner" whose owner this desk could not establish, and nothing was read from that either.

What Does Fireflies Cost? $18 a Seat Billed Monthly, $10 on the Annual View the Page Opens In

Fireflies prices per seat, and its pricing page opens in the annual view. On load, the toggle labelled "Enable annual billing" reads aria-checked="true" and the header row reads "Monthly | Annual | Save up to 44%". Press the toggle and the URL gains a billing parameter and the Pro and Business figures change. Both views were read in one browser session on 22 September 2026.

The 44% on the header belongs to Pro: $10 against $18. Business's gap is $10 a seat, $19 against $29. Enterprise never moves, because the page sells it on a year only.

A seat is a person, not a workspace. The billing FAQ says Fireflies "uses seat-based billing" and that "each teammate you add to your workspace is counted as a paid seat", with "Every active user" counting as a billable one. Section 7(e) of the Terms adds what happens if you overshoot: "If you exceed your Seat limit, Fireflies may automatically increase your Subscription Fee to include the additional Seat licenses at the then-current Seat price." So the arithmetic a buyer needs is per head. Two people on Pro billed monthly is $18 twice, $36 a month. The same pair on the annual view is $10 a month each, which is $120 a seat across twelve months and $240 for the two. The vendor does that arithmetic itself in one place: its refund article prices an annual Business seat at "$228/user/year", which is $19 twelve times.

Two rival pages on the results for this product's review and pricing queries print different figures, and both are readable as right. The tl;dv review dated April 15, 2026 lists Pro at $10 and Business at $19, and says underneath, "All prices are per user per month when billed annually." MeetGeek's pricing article, published December 3, 2025 and updated February 2, 2026, prints $18, $29 and $39, which is the monthly column plus annual-only Enterprise. That same article describes the free plan as "800 minutes of transcription per month"; the pricing page read on 22 September 2026 prints "Unlimited transcription*" and puts its cap on storage instead.

Is Fireflies Free? What the Free Plan Includes, and What Starts on Pro

There is a free tier and the card calls it "Free forever". It lists "Unlimited transcription*", "Limited AI summaries", "400 mins of storage/team" and "20 AI credits", and its key-feature list runs to the apps, the Chrome extension, "Upload audio/video file" and "API access".

Two details on that card repay a second look. The asterisk after "Unlimited transcription*" has no footnote anywhere in the rendered page or in its raw bytes, so this review reports the asterisk and does not guess what it qualifies. And the storage unit changes between tiers: Free is "400 mins of storage/team", where Pro is "8,000 mins of storage/seat". A team's free allowance is shared between everybody; a paid one is per person.

Downloading is where the free tier stops. The vendor's download article puts it in one line: "Downloading meeting transcripts, summaries, and audio or video recordings is available on Fireflies Pro plans and higher." The plan cards and the download article put video recording there too, although the vendor's trial article places it on Business, a disagreement set out in the API section further down. The API documentation caps free video uploads at 100MB against 1.5GB for paid users. Password-protected sharing links for people outside the workspace sit further up again, on Business and Enterprise.

If you arrive through a trial rather than through the free tier, the billing FAQ says what happens at the end of it: "If you don't cancel your subscription before your 7-day trial ends, Fireflies automatically transitions you to a paid plan." The trial article, read on 23 September 2026, says which plan that is and what starting one requires: "The free trial starts on the Business plan by default. A valid credit/debit card is required to activate it". It says "you won't be charged during the trial", and that teammates who accept an invitation during it "count as additional seats" and are billed under the chosen plan once it ends. The way out runs through Settings and Billing to a Cancel Trial button, after which the account "switches to the Free plan", and the same Billing page carries a route down to Pro, through Edit subscription, for anyone who wants the cheaper seat instead. Cancelling has its own deadline, in section 7(b) of the Terms: "You must cancel your Recurring Subscription at least 24 hours before the end of the current Subscription Period to avoid being charged the Subscription Fee for the next Subscription Period."

How Fireflies AI Credits Work, and When a Plan Can Upgrade Itself

AI Credits are a second meter running beside the seat price. The plan cards give 20 credits on Free and Pro, 30 on Business and 50 on Enterprise. The billing FAQ says credits are what pays for "AskFred , AI Skills Magic Soundbites , and Custom summaries", that they come with a free trial on paid plans, and that if that trial is not cancelled "you will be charged an additional fee starting at $5 per month per user". The same article names the toggle behind that charge: "Once exhausted, auto-subscribe to 50 credits at $5/month".

The Terms are blunter about what a credit is. Section 7(f) says credits "are not legal tender or currency, have no cash value, and are not redeemable for cash or refunds", that they "expire at the end of a Subscription Period and do not roll over to subsequent periods", and that "Fireflies has no obligation to refund or rollover unused Credits."

Section 7(g) is the clause a budget holder should read twice, because it can move a subscription without a separate purchase step. It defines an Auto-Upgrade feature and says: "If Auto-Upgrade is enabled and your use of Credits exceeds the limit for your current tier, your Recurring Subscription will automatically upgrade to the next available tier." An opt-out exists, with a deadline attached: "you must opt out prior to exceeding your Credit allotment to avoid automatically upgrading." And the upgrade is not temporary, in the same clause's words. It "will apply to all subsequent Subscription Periods until you downgrade or cancel your Recurring Subscription."

What Fireflies' Terms Say About Consent, Ownership, Refunds and Arbitration

Everything in this section comes from two documents at fireflies.ai, both carrying the date "Last Updated: March 6, 2026" and both read on 22 September 2026, plus the vendor's own refund article. Section numbers are given so a reader can check the clause rather than this page's summary of it.

Who Has to Get Consent When Fireflies Records a Meeting? Section 5(d)

Section 5(d) of the Terms is the clause a buying team should settle before it installs anything. It reads: "If your User Content is from or features another person, you represent and warrant that you have obtained that person's permission before sharing the content with Fireflies. This means, for example, that when using the Services in connection with a meeting, you must ensure that each meeting participant consents to recordings as described in our Privacy Policy."

Section 5(a) sets out how wide your User Content goes when you are the one who called the meeting: "when you host a meeting using the Services, all content contributed by any participant (including the audio and video streams of such participants) is your User Content." The desktop page says the same thing in marketing prose, twice: "Make sure to get consent from all participants", and, in the small print under the download buttons, "You're responsible for complying with local recording laws and notifying participants."

This page reports what that contract says and stops there. It does not tell any reader what a law requires of them, in any country or state, and nothing here is legal advice. The category page tells buyers to read this clause in any note taker's terms, because a note taker records everyone on the call.

One practical consequence is worth naming for the people on the other side of the call, because Fireflies names it itself. The Privacy Policy points a participant who has no account to the host first: "If you do not have an account but participated in a meeting where our Services were enabled, please reach out to the meeting host to request deletion of the meeting recording." The same paragraph goes on: "You may also contact us at support@fireflies.ai if you have further questions or require assistance."

Who Owns a Fireflies Transcript, and Does Fireflies Train on Your Meetings?

Ownership is clean: output rights read 100 on the commercial-terms row, level with the published refund window. Section 10(a) defines transcriptions and summaries as Outputs and says: "Your Inputs and Outputs are your User Content." Section 5(b) adds: "Except for the license you grant below, as between you and Fireflies, you retain all rights in and to your User Content, excluding any portion of the Services included in your User Content." No tier line qualifies it, so it reads the same on the free plan as on Enterprise.

The licence the user grants back is broad. Section 5(c) calls it "perpetual and irrevocable", and qualifies that in the same sentence: "provided that if you delete your User Content from the Services, Fireflies will delete copies of such content within a reasonable timeframe, unless such content remains in another user's account and subject to our retention of copies for archival, backup, and legal compliance purposes." The same clause is where the training answer lives. Fireflies "will exercise its rights solely in connection with providing the Services to you and authorized users in your user group" and "will not use your User Content to train, retrain, fine-tune or otherwise improve any generative artificial intelligence models."

There is a caveat in the sentence immediately after, and it belongs beside the promise: "Fireflies may derive usage, statistical, and other data from your User Content and use such derived data for its internal business purposes, including analyzing and improving the Services."

The Privacy Policy carries the same position in its own words: "We do not use personal information for AI model training and we contractually prohibit our vendors from using this information for their own model training." It also states a Zero Data Retention policy for meeting content, under which audio, video, transcripts and summaries are not kept by third-party vendors after processing and are not used to train models. For business customers the policy points elsewhere: it "does not apply to User Content we process on behalf of our business customers", which the Terms, a Data Processing Agreement and other agreements govern instead. The vendor's summary of that agreement answers the training question directly: "No AI training on Customer Personal Data."

Owning the file answers what an account holder may do with it. That is a different question from what happens to the voices of everybody else in the room, which the next section takes up.

Can You Get a Refund From Fireflies? Seven Days and a Meeting Count

The Terms of Service contain no subscription refund clause at all. The only place the word refund appears in them is the credits clause quoted above. The refund policy lives in a help article instead, and it gates eligibility on a meeting count as well as on days. It gives its own reason: "This ensures fairness and prevents misuse, like uploading lots of meetings and requesting a refund immediately after."

On a monthly plan, a full refund is available if "You've used Fireflies for 7 days or less" and "You've logged 3 meetings or fewer"; past either, the article offers a pro-rated refund. On an annual plan, a full refund needs 7 days or less and "20 meetings or fewer", and the article adds: "Pro-rated refunds are not available on annual plans". Its own summary repeats the shape: "Full refunds are possible within the first 7 days, based on usage" and "Pro-rated refunds apply only to monthly plans".

Two smaller things sit in the same article. Its worked example prints the annual condition as fewer than 20 meetings, where the rule above it says 20 or fewer, so a buyer at exactly twenty meetings is reading two statements. And the mechanics are stated: refunds take "5-10 business days", a card has to be stored on the account for one to be processed, and the request goes through the support widget inside the app rather than through a form. The article's page prints a relative stamp rather than a date, so no date for it is given here.

Moving to a cheaper plan is handled as account credit by default. The billing FAQ's answer on downgrading: "The price difference for your unused time will automatically be converted into account credits and applied to your next billing cycle." The same page answers the question a second time, higher up, and adds: "You can also request a refund, and the difference will be credited according to the refund policy."

Does Fireflies Indemnify Its Users? One Way on Pro, Scoped on Business, and the Arbitration Opt-Out

In the Terms of Service, which govern the Pro seat this card prices, indemnification runs one way. Section 15 opens: "To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, you will indemnify and hold harmless Fireflies and our officers, directors, agents, partners, and employees", and lists what it covers, including "your User Content or Feedback" and "your violation, misappropriation, or infringement of any rights of another (including intellectual property rights or privacy rights)". Section 15 is the only indemnity in that document, and no clause running the other way was found in it. Read section 15 beside section 5(a) and the two name the same person: the account holder, whose User Content, in a meeting they host, includes every participant's audio.

Business and Enterprise seats sit under a second document as well. Section 8(b) of the Terms puts them under Business User Supplemental Terms, which "will control" where the two conflict, and those, read on 23 September 2026 and dated March 6, 2026, add an indemnity running the other way: Fireflies "will defend and indemnify you" against third-party claims "alleging that Fireflies' technology used to provide the Services infringes any third party's intellectual property rights". It excludes, among other things, claims arising from "User Content", so the transcripts and recordings themselves are outside it, and section 1 of the same document limits it to Business and Enterprise plans. The commercial-terms row reads it as a vendor indemnity scoped away from the Pro seat this card prices.

Section 18(b) caps what Fireflies can owe: total liability is "limited to the greater of $100, or the total fees paid by you to Fireflies to use our Services in the six months preceding the date on which the first claim giving rise to liability arose". For Business and Enterprise seats, the supplemental terms replace that sentence: liability, other than under their own indemnity, is "limited to the total fees paid by you to Fireflies to use our Services in the 12 months preceding the date on which the first claim giving rise to liability arose".

Section 20 sends disputes to binding individual arbitration and waives class actions and jury trial. It also carries a door out, in 20(j), with a 30-day deadline, which the Terms flag in capitals at the top of the document and again at the head of section 20: "You have the right to opt out of binding arbitration by e-mailing support@fireflies.ai within 30 days of (i) you first agreeing to the version of these Terms dated 2026-03-06 or later; or (ii) you first using the Services, whichever is later." The notice has to be on your own behalf and carry your full name, mailing address and email address.

Is Fireflies Safe for the People on Your Calls? Voice Data, the Lawsuits, and Keeping the Bot Out

The Privacy Policy describes what happens to a voice, and why: "To provide or enable certain features, such as differentiating participants' voices in a meeting for purposes of creating meeting transcripts and summaries, our service providers may use voice recordings to extract or generate data about participants' voice characteristics". The document names that Voice Data and says it may be considered biometric identifiers or biometric information in some jurisdictions. The same paragraph draws two limits: "Our service providers do not use Voice Data to identify or authenticate individuals, and we never receive or process this information on our own servers."

The policy carries a section headed Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. Its retention sentence reads: "we maintain a written retention schedule and guidelines for permanently destroying such information when the initial purpose for collecting or obtaining it has been satisfied or within three (3) years of an individual's last interaction with us, whichever occurs first." Where a service provider generates that data, the policy says Fireflies requires the provider to destroy it on the same schedule.

Account data has its own clock: "If you close your account, we will delete personal information related to your account within 30 days."

Compliance is stated on the vendor's security page, read on 23 September 2026, in one sentence: "Certified for GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, and HIPAA compliance, ensuring top security and privacy standards." That is the vendor's own statement. No audit report was read for this page, and the plan cards list "HIPAA compliance" among the Enterprise tier's features rather than among Pro's. For Business and Enterprise seats part of it is also a contract term: the supplemental terms commit Fireflies to "a compliance program that includes independent third-party audits and certifications, including SOC 2".

Is Fireflies Being Sued? Where Four Cases Stood on 22 September 2026

Four federal suits name Fireflies.AI Corp. They were filed between 18 December 2025 and 30 March 2026, and all four cite Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act and voiceprints. What follows is docket record, read from CourtListener on 22 September 2026. These are allegations. No court has ruled on liability in any of them, and nothing below predicts one.

The allegation itself is one sentence in the Fricker complaint, paragraph 7: "Fireflies collected and stored Plaintiff's and Class members' voiceprints without complying with BIPA §§ 15(a) or 15(b)." A law firm's write-up of the first of these suits is linked from the r/cybersecurity thread that surfaces on this product's own results page, opened 12 February 2026.

Recording meetings has drawn privacy litigation elsewhere in this market, which is the context any use of the paragraph above needs. In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation (N.D. California, 5:25-cv-06911) was filed on 15 August 2025 and carried no termination date on the docket read 22 September 2026. Chamberlain v. Granola, Inc. (N.D. California, 3:26-cv-07926) was filed on 30 July 2026, and its complaint rests on California's Invasion of Privacy Act and the federal Wiretap Act rather than on the Illinois statute, citing neither that statute nor voiceprints.

How Do You Stop Fireflies Joining Meetings? The Defaults, and What Admins Report

Start with the vendor's own defaults, because they decide when the bot joins and every one of them is changeable. The calendar is why the bot turns up at all. Signing in through Google or Microsoft gives Fireflies, in the Privacy Policy's words, "calendar data, including event titles, descriptions, dates and times, and guest lists", and the auto-join settings act on "any future meetings scheduled on your connected calendar". Auto-record: "Toggle off Auto-record meetings to stop Fireflies from automatically joining your meetings (By default, this will be enabled)." Scope: "By default, Fireflies is set to join all meetings with a web-conf link", with a dropdown offering "Only meetings that I own", "Only meetings with teammates" and "Only when I invite fred@fireflies.ai" instead. Recap email: "By default, this is set to Everyone on the invite", with "Only me and participants from my Fireflies team" and "Only me" underneath it. Visibility: "By default, this is set to Teammates & Anyone with Link", with Participants and "Only Owner" further down the same list. Workspace admins can set the last two for everybody from the Team tab, and after a privacy default is changed the app asks whether to apply it to past meetings as well as future ones.

Three dated accounts describe what happens when somebody tries to stop the bot from outside those settings. A Microsoft Q&A question of 22 January 2025: "Despite removing the bot from the app, it continues to automatically join my meetings and webinars as a participant, which I am unable to prevent." The r/sysadmin thread of 7 October 2025, from an administrator who had already blocked the app: "Seems like the only way to get it to stop is go to their site and delete the account." And a LinkedIn post of 20 October 2025 by an IT professional: "We're seeing their note taking agent join employees meetings even after deleting their accounts at Fireflies.ai , a massive security concern."

What that thread's practitioners settle on is a tenant setting rather than a property of this one product. One reply of 7 October 2025: "It's how you have your OAuth grants configured", followed by three consent levels and a recommendation to move to the strictest and work backwards. Another reply that day tells the thread to block Read AI and Otter AI "as well, as they do the exact same thing", and the LinkedIn thread carries the same story about Read.AI and about Motion from named commenters. By those practitioners' accounts, this is a category behaviour rather than a quirk of one vendor.

On undoing a sign-up that has already happened, the same thread disagrees with itself, in two replies posted one second apart on 8 October 2025. The first: "Revoke token works well without nuking the account entirely". The second: "these systems just ignore if you delete your account, etc. the oauth permission is still granted and there is no way for the user to revoke it", adding that the permission cannot be removed "through the entra portal" and that "The only way to remove the permission is to use Graph API/powershell", with a link to Microsoft's reference page for that command. Neither route was tried for this page; both are on record for an administrator to check against their own tenant.

Two routes sit outside the bot entirely and matter to anyone planning to block a domain. The Chrome extension is one, named by a commenter on r/AIAssisted on 18 March 2026: "You can use Fireflies extension for Chrome to avoid bots joining the meeting." The desktop app is the other, sold on exactly that basis under "Botless Meetings, Finally". In the other direction, a host can keep the bot out of a single call without touching any setting: the vendor's own article says the notetaker "must be admitted into the meeting before it can start capturing", lists "The host denies or removes Fireflies before recording starts" among the reasons capture never happens, and notes that Google Meet may show Fireflies in a "With potential risks" section of its waiting room, which the same article calls "a Google Meet warning that gives hosts more visibility into participants joining a meeting" and says "doesn't mean Fireflies is unsafe".

Fireflies Reviews on Six Platforms: 4.5 to 4.9, and Who Invited the Reviewers

Six platforms publish a rating, and all six were read on 22 September 2026. Three of them, G2, Trustpilot and Capterra, refuse automated access and were read in a rendered browser instead; the figures below are the pages' own.

The two app-store figures come from the listings' own data and are printed to four decimal places rather than rounded to one.

Only two of those records feed the score card, and the reason sits in the last column. G2 and Trustpilot each say on the page how their samples were recruited, and they say the same thing: on the first page of G2 reviews read that day, three of six carried an "Incentivized" label and three were organic, while Trustpilot's own panel reads "Asks customers to review". Records that declare the same regime can be pooled; records that declare nothing are published here with their counts and left out of the arithmetic. The app-store pair is much larger and would have pulled the row up rather than down, so leaving it out does not flatter this card.

Capterra adds two sub-scores of its own, Ease of use 4.8 and Customer Service 4.5, and dates its page 17 September 2026. Trustpilot marks the profile as claimed, and the page carries two service panels: "Replied to 35% of negative reviews" and "Typically replies within 24 hours".

Those panels describe how the company answers reviews on Trustpilot, which is a different encounter from asking for help with the bot, and the dated accounts of that second encounter point both ways. The LinkedIn post of 20 October 2025 quoted above says: "Their product support team seems to be non-existent. No number to call, they require you to register an account (which I did not want to do) in order to reach anyone to discuss." On the first of the four answer pages of the Microsoft Q&A thread on removal (opened 22 January 2025, 17 answers, and a platform counter reading "Same question (200+)"), two users report contacting Fireflies support and being told to delete accounts on the vendor's site; one added "So far so good!", and the other wrote that doing "the same steps" had not stopped the bot before support told them to have users delete their accounts. This page reports both and resolves neither.

Three gaps in this section, stated rather than smoothed over. Nothing here quotes an individual review from G2, Trustpilot or Capterra: those platforms refuse automated reading, and the rendered-browser pass recorded their ratings and sampling panels rather than review bodies, so the themes below come from forums. Two further Reddit threads this desk went looking for could not be located, so nothing from them appears here. Product Hunt was not reached by any method tried.

Is Fireflies Accurate? The 95% Claims, and a Competing Vendor's Word-Error Study

Three accuracy figures circulate for this product, and not one of them is an independent measurement. The first is the vendor's own. Its homepage, read on 22 September 2026, says "95% Accurate", and Lindy's review, last updated October 30, 2025, passes it on: transcription works "with 95% accuracy, as mentioned on their home page". A table on tl;dv's review page prints "~91% (independent benchmarks)" for Fireflies against "97%+ Winner" for tl;dv, and names no benchmark anywhere on the page; that page's author discloses the relationship directly: "I am a writer for tl;dv, one of Fireflies' German-built competitors." The Reddit post in position 1 for "fireflies ai review" on 21 September 2026 offers a third, the poster's own: "Summary bullets were 90–95% accurate in my testing".

One document does publish per-product numbers. MeetMemo, on 1 March 2026, published "Best AI Meeting Notes 2026: Independent Accuracy Benchmarks (Multilingual)", measuring word error rates for five tools across English, Dutch and French. Its headline table is led by MeetMemo's own product at 4.9% average, and MeetMemo sells one of the five products it tested. Fireflies averages 13.7% there, third of the five, with 4.1% in English, 22.3% in Dutch and 14.6% in French. Of the English column the study says: "For English, the field is tight. Every tool achieves WER below 5% in clean audio with native speakers."

Read the study's other two tables and the ordering moves. In its English-only audio conditions, Otter.ai returns a lower error rate than Fireflies in all four settings, from a quiet office (2.5% against 2.9%) to a laptop mic in a meeting room (6.1% against 8.1%). The study's own comment on those rows: "In a loud open-plan office, Otter has a real edge for English." In speaker attribution, Otter.ai is ahead of Fireflies at every meeting size measured, including 91% against 87% at three to five speakers and 83% against 79% at six or more. Fireflies' three-language average still lands ahead of Otter.ai's 16.7%, on the strength of the Dutch and French columns. The study's own summary line says twenty meetings were tested; its method section says forty.

So it is read here and not scored. Its publisher sells a competitor, and five products is too small a field for one study's own spread to anchor a number on this site. That is why the capability position on this card carries a different criterion, described below, and why no accuracy percentage appears on it. Fireflies' own Terms say something similar in the vendor's voice, in section 10(b): Outputs "may be biased, inaccurate or offensive", and "You should treat Outputs only as a starting point."

What Fireflies Users on Reddit Say Happens After the Meeting

The complaints that recur in genuine threads are not about whether the words are right. They are about what happens next. The r/AIAssisted question of 26 November 2025 that ranks for this product's alternatives query puts it in two sentences: "We have accurate transcripts that nobody acts on. The notes are isolated from our project management tools." Underneath it, a reply of 28 November 2025 from somebody in the same position: "We were in the same spot with fireflies. It felt like great transcripts that just collected digital dust. What finally clicked for us was switching to clickup for project management". The fix it describes was a project-management tool rather than a different note taker.

Two smaller frictions come from a different thread, both from people using the product. On 28 June 2025: "I, for the life of me, cannot get Fireflies to send my meeting notes to Notion." On 30 September 2025, a commenter who opened with "I had a similar experience, Fireflies’ auto-join and Slack/Notion sync are game-changers" went on: "The main friction for me was speaker labeling and transcript delays; even small mix-ups create client headaches."

One fact about where those last two quotes come from, because it changes how the thread around them should be read. On the results page for this product's review query, captured 21 September 2026, the first organic result was a Reddit post in r/LovedByCreators titled "I used Fireflies.ai for 33 meetings in 30 days". Every product link in that post points at fireflies.ai with the same parameter appended, ?fpr=free; the subreddit's own description reads "Where Creators discuss Social Media, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. BH & WH tactics to make money w/ digital products and Affiliate."; and the thread's first comment, posted automatically one second after the post, opens "Get Start Here - Affiliate Marketing Guides". That is a description of the page, not of the person who wrote it. The comments below it are a different population, and they are the only part of that thread quoted here.

Is Fireflies Good? What the 83.1 Measures, Row by Row

The card reads 83.1, and the four rows under it were read on 22 and 23 September 2026.

Take 81.6, 91.5, 69.2 and 92.1 as a geometric mean and the composite is 83.1, in the high band. The methodology page sets out why the rows combine that way rather than by averaging, and what each grade of evidence means.

One row is not what its position suggests, and this is the part to read slowly. The capability position on this card does not measure output quality. It carries a named criterion, Delivery envelope, whose question is what the entry paid tier lets you take away: the formats a transcript leaves in, whether the file carries vendor branding, whether the priced tier reaches an API, and which surfaces it runs on. Four of that criterion's sub-components are filled from vendor documents and five are excluded from the mean, because nothing the vendor publishes answers them for this product: no resolution ceiling for recorded video, no output volume in a unit other products share (Pro publishes unlimited transcription, 8,000 storage minutes and 20 credits, which are three different units), no usage-rights line on the pricing page, no revision allowance that applies to a note taker, and a language count that describes transcription rather than rewriting.

Because one cell answers a different question, this composite is a mean over three of the four named dimensions plus the delivery-envelope criterion standing in for the fourth. Set this 83.1 beside a card whose capability row measures what its product produces, such as an arena rating, and the two numbers are built from different evidence; treat them as neighbours, not as rivals on one scale. The card says so where the number is, and so does this paragraph. A delivery-envelope figure would rise for a product that hands back a large, unmarked, automatable file of poor notes.

The other three rows sit on their own axis. Usability rests on 1,556 ratings in total, 753 plus 803, both from platforms whose own pages say at least part of the sample was invited, which is a weaker sample than an uninvited one and is disclosed on the card rather than buried under it. Value prices the monthly seat, because every card on this site prices a real month, and $18 is a real month rather than a year paid up front. Commercial terms reads off the clauses quoted earlier, and three things put it high: ownership of outputs is unambiguous, a refund window is published, and a vendor indemnity exists, scoped as it is. It covers Business and Enterprise seats and leaves user content out, so the Pro seat priced here sits under the one-way clause alone. That row measures what the documents commit to, not whether the commitments are honoured.

Thin spot, named. The delivery envelope is the thinnest row on this card: it rests on four published facts from help pages, where the other three rest on the vendor's contracts, a price and 1,556 ratings.

Does Fireflies Have an API? 50 or 500 Requests a Day, 60 a Minute, and a FAQ That Says Business

The API documentation publishes a rate table by plan: Free 50 requests per day, Pro 500 per day, Business and Enterprise 60 per minute. Its prose repeats it: "Pro Plan: Suited for moderate to heavy usage, with a cap of 500 API requests per day." Two narrower limits sit underneath. The Add to Live API allows 3 requests per 20 minutes, and the Share Meeting API allows 10 per hour with up to 50 email addresses in each.

The pricing page disagrees with that documentation. Its FAQ answer about the difference between the free and paid tiers says: "The business tier gets API access, analytics, private channels, video recording, and other advanced team features." The plan cards on the same page list "API access" among the Free tier's key features and video recording on Pro, and the download help article says video recording is available on Pro, Business and Enterprise plans. That is one FAQ answer contradicting the cards beside it on two separate features, and on video recording it is not alone: the trial article, read on 23 September 2026, says a downgrade from Business to Pro means "you'll lose access to unlimited storage, video recording, conversational analytics, and other Business plan features".

This review reports the contradiction and does not settle it. The delivery-envelope reading follows the technical documentation, which is the more specific of the two. A team whose purchase depends on API access or video recording at the Pro price should get that in writing before paying, because on 22 and 23 September 2026 the vendor's own documents answered both questions two ways.

Fireflies Alternatives, Named in Alphabetical Order Rather Than Ranked

These are the products that came up beside Fireflies in the documents and threads read for this card. Each gets sourced facts rather than a score, none is ranked against another, and none is linked from this page.

• Fathom. Has its own card on this site, built from its Terms of Service, pricing page and platform records read on 11 October 2026.
• Lindy. Its own review of Fireflies describes Lindy as a product that "lets you create AI agents that handle follow-ups, CRM updates, and phone workflows", which is an automation platform with meeting notes inside it rather than a note taker.
• MeetGeek. Its own pricing article describes its free Basic plan as "3 hours of monthly transcription, 3 months of transcript storage, and 1 month of audio storage", and says "MeetGeek holds SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA certifications", which, like Fireflies' own compliance sentence, is the vendor's statement rather than something checked here.
• Otter.ai. MeetMemo's study puts its English error rate below Fireflies' in all four audio conditions it tested, and an r/sysadmin reply of 7 October 2025 on stopping the bot, which says the account had to be deleted on the vendor's site, adds "Otter works the same way".
• Read AI. Its article held the first organic position on the results page for this product's alternatives query, captured 22 September 2026, and in October 2025 an r/sysadmin reply told administrators to block it alongside Fireflies "as they do the exact same thing", while a LinkedIn commenter described its bot joining meetings after the account had been deleted.
• tl;dv. Its own page describes a product that "Records, transcribes and takes notes in 30+ different languages" and advertises a plan it calls "Forever free".

This card, and any note taker scored after it, is listed on the AI note takers category page.

Should Your Team Pay for Fireflies? Who the $18 Seat Fits, and Who Should Wait

Buy the Pro seat if the job is your own calls, you want them written up without changing how you meet, and you will set four defaults before the first meeting: auto-record, auto-join scope, recap recipients and meeting privacy. At $18 a month billed monthly, Pro is where downloads in six formats and 500 API requests a day begin, the exports leave in shapes another tool can open, and the branding on a downloaded transcript can be switched off. The contract is plain on two points: the transcript is yours on every tier, and the training answer is written into section 5(c) rather than into a blog post.

Buy Business instead, at $29 a seat billed monthly, if your organisation needs contract terms rather than defaults. Its supplemental terms add an IP indemnity that leaves user content out, a commitment to audits "including SOC 2", a liability cap of twelve months' fees, and 60 days' notice before changed terms apply unless the change is needed "to comply with law or address an urgent safety or security issue". None of that reaches the Pro seat.

Wait if your meetings routinely include people from outside your organisation and you have no way to ask each of them, before the bot records, whether they agree to it. Section 5(d) puts that step on you, section 15 indemnifies in one direction only on the Pro seat, and the four defaults the vendor's help articles document include no step that asks the other participants.

Wait, too, if the decision turns on transcription accuracy in any language. The only per-product table found for this card was published by a company selling a competing product, this desk ran no test of its own, and the vendor's own Terms tell users to treat outputs as a starting point.

And if you administer Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace for other people, settle the tenant's app-consent setting before anybody signs up rather than after. The r/sysadmin account starts with one employee clicking a link inside a meeting out of curiosity. What the administrators on this page reached for afterwards was a consent policy and, in three of the reports, deleting the account on the vendor's site; the LinkedIn post says the bot kept joining after accounts were deleted. That is governance work, and by those same administrators' accounts it is the same work for Otter and Read AI.

The 83.1 on this card describes the vendor's contracts, a price, what the Pro seat lets you take away and 1,556 ratings gathered at least partly by invitation, and it is re-read every month on the note takers page and here. It is not a measurement of how good the notes are, and nothing on this site claims to have measured that yet.