Fireflies Free Is 3 Meetings by Default: The Asterisk on "Unlimited Transcription" Is Auto Join

If you take the pricing page line “Unlimited transcription”* at face value, there is a good chance your fourth meeting goes unrecorded.

What that asterisk means is now spelled out in the knowledge base: the free plan gives you 3 meeting transcriptions by default, and “unlimited” only applies once Auto Join is enabled. Here is a line-by-line comparison of three official pages, followed by the setup order that gets the most out of the free tier. Verified 2026-09-08.

1. Three official pages, three different stories

The same number is written three ways across official pages — whether 400 minutes is per team or per seat, whether 20 credits are one-time or monthly. That is not a reading problem on our side; the vendor’s own pages disagree. Our earlier verification followed the pricing page’s per-team wording; the current knowledge base says per seat. Until the vendor aligns them, treat that line as unverified.

2. Step one: turn on Auto Join, or “unlimited” does not apply

The knowledge base wording for the free plan is: 3 free meeting transcriptions by default, or unlimited transcriptions with Auto Join enabled.

So the correct free-tier setup is:

1. Connect a calendar first (Google Calendar or Outlook). Auto Join decides whether to attend based on the meeting link inside your calendar events.
2. Enable Auto Join in settings, then check its scope — all meetings, only ones you host, or only external ones. Too narrow a scope and the bot never joins, which drops you back to three meetings.
3. Use fred@fireflies.ai for ad-hoc calls: add that address to the invite and the notetaker will join.

Without Auto Join, the asterisk does not apply. It is the most common first mistake on the free tier.

3. What runs out first is 400 minutes of storage, not transcriptions

The storage article is blunt about it: this is the total minutes of meetings you can store, not a monthly allowance. It does not reset at the start of the month. Once it is full, storing something new means deleting something old yourself.

What 400 minutes buys:

• One 30-minute meeting a day → full in roughly 13 meetings
• Two 1-hour meetings a week → full in a bit over three months
• At the 2-hour per-meeting cap → fewer than 4 meetings in the worst case

Practical approach: treat the free tier as a working memory for the current week, not as an archive. Pick one day a week to delete meetings whose summaries you have already read and copied into your own notes. Space only comes back when you delete.

4. Where to spend the 20 AI credits

Free-tier AI features (AskFred-style questions) draw on AI credits. The pricing page says 20; the knowledge base now calls them one-time per seat, while the free-plan article we verified earlier described a monthly reset. Both wordings exist, so the safe assumption is that you get them once.

Under that assumption:

• Do not burn them re-testing summaries. Summaries on the free tier are “Limited AI summaries” in the pricing page’s own words — capped by design.
• Save credits for questions worth asking once, such as “what date did we promise the client in this call”.
• Paste every answer into your own notes immediately. The free tier cannot download transcripts (export starts at Pro), so anything you do not move out by hand stays locked inside Fireflies.

The full consequences of that export limit are covered in Fireflies free cannot export transcripts.

5. Two ceilings before you upload old recordings

The free tier accepts audio and video uploads, with two layers of limits:

1. 100MB and 150 minutes per file (knowledge base).
2. Each upload consumes one transcription credit — without Auto Join, three uploads exhaust the free allowance.
3. Uploads have their own rate cap: 3,000 minutes per source per month for individuals, then US$0.01 per minute. Live bot transcription, the Chrome extension and mobile recordings are not rate limited.

In short: bulk-uploading an archive is the most expensive way to use the free tier. Live capture, meeting by meeting, is the path the design expects.

6. When upgrading is actually warranted

Three questions:

• Do you need to hand transcripts to anyone else? If yes — clients, a knowledge base, another tool — the free tier cannot do it. Download starts at Pro.
• Do you need to keep more than 400 minutes? Pro is 8,000 minutes, a 20× difference.
• Will you ask more than 20 AI questions? If yes, the ambiguous credit reset is the first thing you will hit.

Three noes and the free tier is enough. One yes and it is worth pricing Pro. Plan details on the Fireflies tool page.

Sources read directly on 2026-09-08: the official pricing page, the knowledge base article Free Plan Limits (page states “Last Updated: 6 days ago”) and Storage and rate limits. The three pages disagree on storage scope (per team vs per seat) and on whether AI credits reset; both wordings are reported as found, with no editorial pick. Price figures follow the pricing page.