Compiled by Amit KumarWhat is Fathom?
Fathom is an AI notetaker. It captures your video calls, transcribes them, and produces a summary and a list of action items without you writing anything down.
On its higher plans it goes further than notes: it writes fields back into a CRM, scores calls against a rubric, and answers questions across your whole call history.
It launched on Product Hunt on 8 December 2021 and won the 2021 Golden Kitty for AI & machine learning, finishing #2 AI & machine learning Product of the Year. Fathom 3.0 took #1 of the week on 15 April 2026. It holds a 5.0 rating from 315 reviews — by a distance the deepest and highest-rated review base of the ten Product Hunt tools in this batch.
Note the address. Fathom has moved from fathom.video to fathom.ai; the old domain 301-redirects. Any listing, bookmark or integration still pointing at fathom.video is out of date.
Prices here come from fathom.ai/pricing, read on 24 September 2026.
Is Fathom free?
Yes, and unusually so. The free plan carries unlimited recordings and transcriptions, plus instant AI call summaries, at $0 forever.
That is worth pausing on, because it is not how this category normally prices. Most notetakers cap the free tier by meeting count or by transcript minutes and put the AI summary behind the paywall. Fathom puts the volume on the free side and charges for depth instead.
- Recordings and transcripts: unlimited.
- AI summaries: included, described as instant call summaries.
- Clips and playlists: included.
- Search: across your calls.
- Capture: a bot that joins the call, with a bot-free option in beta for Mac.
What you do not get for free is the reasoning layer: advanced summaries, AI-generated action items, the conversational assistant and the custom bot all sit on Premium.
So the honest framing is that Fathom's free plan is a complete recorder and a basic summariser, and the paid plans are where it becomes an assistant.
How much does Fathom cost?
On 24 September 2026: Premium $20 a month ($16 billed yearly), Team $19 a user a month ($15 yearly), Business $34 a user a month ($25 yearly). Team plans need at least two users.
| Plan | Monthly | Billed yearly | Who it is for | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | Anyone | Unlimited recording, transcription, instant summaries, clips, search |
| Premium | $20 | $16 | One person | Advanced summaries, AI action items, meeting assistant, custom bot, Ask Fathom |
| Team | $19/user | $15/user | 2+ users | Global search, team playlists, comments, folders, keyword alerts |
| Business | $34/user | $25/user | Revenue teams | CRM field sync, Deal View, coaching metrics, AI scorecards, custom summaries |
| Enterprise | Sales | Sales | Large orgs | SSO and SCIM, custom retention, launch assist, dedicated CSM |
Every plan carries a 90-day guarantee, which is long by the standards of monthly software and takes some of the risk out of the annual commitment.
The solo user pays more than a team member
Premium, the one-person plan, costs $20 a month. Team, which needs two users, costs $19 a user. So the individual plan is a dollar more per seat than the team plan — $16 against $15 on annual billing.
This is backwards from the usual direction and it has a practical consequence. Two people on Team pay $38 a month and get everything in Premium plus global search, shared playlists, comments, folders and keyword alerts. Two people each on their own Premium plan pay $40 and get none of the shared features.
If there are two of you, there is no configuration in which separate Premium plans are the right answer. The only reason to be on Premium is that you are genuinely alone.
What the pricing page leaves undefined
Two things on the Premium plan are described without numbers, and both are worth asking sales about before you commit to a year.
"Ask Fathom (limited use)"
Ask Fathom is the feature that queries your call history in natural language, and on Premium it is qualified as limited use. The pricing page does not say limited to what — questions a day, questions a month, or something measured another way.
That hedge is Fathom's own wording. Where a vendor declines to quantify a limit, treat the feature as unsized rather than unlimited, and find the number before you build a workflow on it.
The bot-free capture is a Mac beta
Fathom's default capture sends a bot into the meeting, which everyone on the call can see. The alternative — capturing the audio on your own machine, so nothing visibly joins — is listed as in beta, for Mac.
If the reason you are shopping is that you do not want a bot appearing in client calls, that is the deciding detail: on Windows, as the pricing page has it, the bot is the way Fathom works. Granola and Tactiq both capture without a bot as their normal mode.
Fathom vs Otter.ai, Granola and Tactiq
Four tools, four different answers to the same question, and the split is cleaner than the feature lists suggest.
- Fathom gives the most away free — unlimited recording, transcription and summaries — and charges for the reasoning layer and the CRM write-back. Best when volume is high and you may later want revenue tooling.
- Granola captures device audio with no bot and blends your own typed notes with the transcript. Its free tier limits how long notes stay readable rather than how many meetings you may have.
- Tactiq runs as a browser extension, so again no bot. Its free tier is 10 transcripts and 5 AI credits a month, and even paid Pro caps AI at 10 credits — the AI, not the transcript, is the limit.
- Otter.ai is the incumbent, with the longest history in transcription.
The practical question is not which is best but whether a bot may join your calls. If yes, Fathom's free plan is the most generous on offer. If no, Granola and Tactiq are built the way you need and Fathom's alternative is still a Mac beta.
Who Fathom suits, and who it does not
It suits anyone taking a lot of calls who wants them all recorded, searchable and summarised without spending anything — that free tier is genuinely the best value in this batch. It suits sales teams even better: Business at $25 a user billed yearly buys CRM field sync, Deal View, coaching metrics and AI scorecards, which is a different product from note-taking and priced below what dedicated conversation-intelligence tools ask.
It does not suit people who cannot have a visible bot in the room, at least not on Windows, while the bot-free path remains a Mac beta. It does not suit a solo user who wants shared search and playlists, because those are Team features and Team needs two seats. And if Ask Fathom is the feature you are buying, get the limit in writing first.
What to use instead of Fathom, and for which job
Granola — if a bot must never appear. It captures device audio as its normal mode on every platform, not as a beta, and merges your own typed notes with the transcript. Its free tier limits how long notes stay readable rather than how many you take.
Tactiq — also bot-free, running as a browser extension. Its free tier is 10 transcripts and 5 AI credits a month, and even paid Pro caps AI at 10 meetings, so AI is what it meters.
Otter.ai — the incumbent, with the longest history in meeting transcription.
Stay on Fathom Free if you want an unlimited archive and can do without AI action items. No competitor here gives away as much.
Sources
Every figure on this page was read from the pages below on 24 September 2026.
- Fathom pricing — plan prices, the free tier's unlimited recording and transcription, the Ask Fathom limited-use wording, the Mac bot-free beta and the 90-day guarantee
- Fathom on Product Hunt — launch date, the 2021 Golden Kitty for AI and machine learning, the Fathom 3.0 weekly ranking, rating and review count
