Free Meeting Transcription API: What You Actually Get, and When to Upgrade

Is there a genuinely free meeting transcription API?

Yes — with real limits. This isn't a "free" tier that locks you out after one API call. Gregnote's free plan gives you enough to build, test, and validate an integration before committing to a paid plan.

Here's what you actually get, in plain terms.

What the Gregnote free plan includes

Free credit on signup: You get credit to run your first bot sessions immediately after signing up. No card required. No form to fill out. The credit shows on your dashboard the moment you create an account.

Full API access: The free plan uses the same API endpoints as paid plans. No stripped-down version, no slower processing, no watermarked transcripts. The API call is identical.

Both platforms: Google Meet and Microsoft Teams bot support is available on the free plan.

Webhook delivery: Webhooks fire on free accounts. The retry logic (1m, 5m, 30m, 2h) applies on free accounts the same as Pro.

Speaker diarization: You get speaker-attributed transcripts on the free plan. "Alice said this, Bob said that" — not a wall of unlabelled text.

Multi-language transcription: Language auto-detection and manual language hints work on the free plan.

What you don't get on the free plan

No-show detection (bot.no_show): The bot.no_show webhook event — which fires when the invitee never joined the meeting — is Pro-only. Free accounts receive meeting.completed even for meetings where only the owner was present. You can still detect this yourself by checking speaker count in the transcript, but the automatic detection and distinct event type are Pro features.

Configurable waiting room timeout: The default waiting room timeout (10 minutes) applies to free accounts and can't be changed. Pro accounts can configure this between 2 and 60 minutes.

Custom bot name: On the free plan, the bot uses the default "Notetaker" name. Pro accounts can set a custom bot name via the settings API.

Priority processing: During periods of high load, Pro accounts get priority in the transcription queue. Free accounts may experience slightly higher latency. In practice, this rarely matters for most use cases.

What the free plan is good for

Prototyping and integration testing

This is the primary use case for the free plan, and it's genuinely well-suited to it. You get enough credit to run tens of bot sessions — enough to build your webhook handler, test edge cases (no-shows, short meetings, multi-speaker calls), and verify your processing pipeline end-to-end before any money changes hands.

Internal tooling

If you're building automatic meeting notes for your own team (not a product you're selling), the free plan may be sufficient indefinitely depending on your meeting volume. A team running 10 meetings per week would exhaust the free credit fairly quickly, but it's enough to validate that the tool is useful before deciding whether to pay for it.

Portfolio projects and hackathons

Building something to demonstrate what you can build? The free plan is enough to ship a polished demo. Many developers have built impressive meeting intelligence demos — Slack bots, Notion integrations, CRM auto-loggers — entirely on the free tier.

What the free plan is not good for

Production customer-facing products: Once real customers are using your product, free credit runs out unpredictably. The last thing you want is a paying customer's meeting bot failing because your API account ran out of credit. Move to Pro before you launch to customers.

High-volume testing: If you want to run load tests or simulate high volumes, the free credit will run out quickly. Contact Gregnote for a test allocation if you're evaluating at scale.

Use cases requiring no-show detection: If your product's workflow depends on knowing whether a meeting was a no-show (sales CRM, recruiting platform, appointment booking), you need Pro for the bot.no_show event.

How to maximise free plan usage during development

A few things that reduce your credit burn during the integration phase:

Use short test meetings: A two-minute test call uses 1/30th of what a one-hour meeting uses. Run your integration tests with short calls.

Test webhook handling separately: Your webhook handler can be tested with locally-crafted payloads — you don't need a live bot session to test how you process the transcript. Build fixtures from real webhook responses and test your processing logic in isolation.

Test no-show separately: The bot.owner_no_show event (waiting room timeout) fires after the timeout period. In a test environment, you can simulate this by not admitting the bot during development.

When to upgrade to Pro

The right time to upgrade is when any of these happen: - You're launching to real customers - You need the bot.no_show event in your webhook handler - Your team's meeting volume is consistently using up free credit - You want a custom bot name for your product's branding

Pro pricing is £0.50/hour of captured audio. For a product serving 20 customers who average 3 meetings per week of 45 minutes each, that's roughly £27/month. Well under the cost of losing a customer because the bot failed.

Getting started

Sign up at app.gregnote.com. Your API key is on the dashboard. Follow the Google Meet integration quickstart to have a bot joining meetings and a webhook firing within an hour.