Fireflies Free Plan 2026: The 400 Storage Minutes Do Not Reset Monthly

Fireflies is the kind of tool you add to a meeting and forget about: it joins, records, transcribes, and writes the summary. The free plan looks generous — the pricing page’s Free column says Unlimited transcription* (note the asterisk). But the AI summaries line in that same column reads Limited AI summaries, not unlimited; unlimited summaries start at Pro. Yet plenty of people find that after two or three weeks, new meetings simply stop showing up. Nothing is broken. They hit a limit that is easy to miss.

Everything below comes from the official knowledge base (guide.fireflies.ai) and this site’s own verification log of the pricing page. Where we could not verify something, we say so.

Last verified: 2026-09-03

1. The real ceiling is storage, not transcription

The free plan does not limit how many calls you record. It limits how many minutes you can keep.

The official free-plan article states 400 minutes of storage per seat. The important part is what follows: this is a total, not a monthly allowance. Once you fill it, nothing resets on the first of the month — you have to go back and delete old meetings before new ones can land.

In practice: three one-hour calls a week is 180 minutes, so you run out in week three. There is no month-ahead warning. The recording just does not appear when you expect it.

⚠️ Official pages disagree, stated plainly: the free-plan article says “400 minutes of storage per seat,” while the pricing page reads “400 mins of storage/team” and the official pricing blog post also says per team. Two of three official surfaces say team, so this article goes with the pricing page: the 400 minutes are shared across the whole team.

2. AI credits: 20 per month, and this one does reset

Unlike storage, AI credits are granted monthly. The official free-plan article states 20 AI credits per month.

This is worth flagging because when this site first catalogued Fireflies on 2026-08-16, the pricing page gave no reset period, so our note read “reset period not published.” The knowledge base states it explicitly. That is a new fact from this round of verification, and we are updating the tool page accordingly.

Credits are spent on deeper AI interactions — asking the assistant follow-up questions about a call, for instance. Ordinary transcripts and automatic summaries do not draw on the 20.

3. The limit most people miss: you cannot download transcripts

The official free-plan article lists transcript downloads among the features that require a paid plan.

You can read the transcript in the browser, search it, and leave timestamped comments. You cannot export it as a file. If your actual workflow is “finish the call, export the transcript, hand it to an AI to write the report,” the free plan closes that door. For most people that, rather than the minute count, is what decides whether to pay.

Confirmed free-plan features, from the official article:

4. Set the language first, or it defaults to English

Fireflies defaults to English Global. If your meetings are in another language and you have not changed this, the transcript will be a mess.

Set a default language (applies to all future meetings):

1. Open the Fireflies web app, click Settings in the left menu
2. Go to Recording & Privacy, Personal tab
3. Scroll to Meeting language under Recording
4. Open the dropdown (it starts on English Global) and pick your language
5. Per the official article, changes save automatically — there is no save button

Change one meeting only:

1. Click the Upcoming tab on the home page
2. Find the meeting, click the language icon
3. Pick the language. Official wording: “Only this meeting will be transcribed in the selected language, while your default settings remain unaffected.”

Two options that get misread:

• Auto-detect: the official article says it “can identify only one primary language per meeting.” A call that switches between two languages will not come out right.
• Multi-Language Mode (Beta): this is the one built for participants speaking different languages in the same call — and it is still marked Beta.

Language is where Fireflies has a genuine edge: 100+ languages including Chinese. By contrast, our verification log records that Fathom officially supports 38 transcription languages and Chinese is not among them.

5. Three ways to get the bot into your meeting

The bot’s address is fred@fireflies.ai. Two prerequisites: your Google or Outlook calendar must be connected, and the calendar invite must contain a web-conference link — without one the bot cannot join.

Supported platforms: Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, GoToMeeting and other web-conference tools.

1. Add it to the calendar invite manually. Put fred@fireflies.ai in the guest list of the Google or Outlook event. Most direct, least likely to go wrong.
2. Auto-join settings. Dashboard → Upcoming → calendar meeting settings. Options: all meetings with a web-conf link, only meetings you own, only meetings with teammates, or only when manually invited. If you are worried about it walking into client calls, pick the last one.
3. Add it to a call already in progress. Capture → “Add to live meeting,” then supply the title and link (language is optional here). The official article says this takes 2 to 3 minutes.

One official warning worth writing down: the bot joins at the scheduled start time and “waits for up to 10 minutes for someone else to join.” A meeting that starts fifteen minutes late is a meeting the bot has already left.

6. How to make the free plan last

1. Clear old meetings once a month. Storage never clears itself; this is the only hard wall on the free plan. Save anything important elsewhere first — remember you cannot download transcripts.
2. Only let it into meetings that matter. Setting auto-join to “only when manually invited” beats deleting a pile of useless recordings later.
3. Set the language before the call, not after. A wrongly transcribed hour still eats the same 60 minutes of storage.

What we could not verify

• Paid plan prices: Pro US$18/mo, Business US$29/mo, Enterprise US$39/mo (annual discounts apply), from this site’s direct reads of the pricing page on 2026-08-28 and 2026-09-03. The free-tier column was re-read directly on 2026-09-04.
• What the asterisk on “Unlimited transcription” covers*: the pricing page marks it but does not spell out the footnote on that page. We could not find it, and we do not guess.
• Whether Taiwanese cards work at checkout: untested; our record says unconfirmed.
• Whether free recordings expire: the official article mentions a storage cap but no expiry. We do not speculate.

Official links and further reading

• Official free plan article: https://guide.fireflies.ai/articles/4027724828-learn-about-the-fireflies-free-plan
• Official invite guide: https://guide.fireflies.ai/articles/4335268657-how-to-invite-fireflies-to-meetings
• Official language settings: https://guide.fireflies.ai/articles/5788629108-set-your-meeting-transcription-language-default-auto-detect-multi-language-or-custom
• Official pricing page: https://fireflies.ai/pricing
• Our tool page: Fireflies.ai pricing and free tier
• The one without Chinese support: Fathom
• More verified free tiers: AMPM guides