Granola AI pricing, what the free plan caps and when $14 is worth it

Granola's pricing page has three numbers on it. $0, $14, and $35, each per user per month. The price isn't the confusing part. The free plan is, because most write-ups (including our own earlier ones) still describe it as a trial with a limited number of meetings. That description is wrong. Basic is a real free plan with one restriction, and that restriction decides whether you ever need to pay.

We run Granola on our own calls every day and we're affiliates. This post is the plain version of the Granola pricing page, checked on October 3, 2026. Prices move, so the live page wins if anything here has drifted. For how the product holds up across a year of real meetings, read our Granola AI review.

Granola pricing at a glance

Granola costs $0 for Basic, $14 per user per month for Business, and $35 per user per month for Enterprise. Basic has no meeting cap, just a 30-day history window. Basic and Business bill monthly, annual billing is for Enterprise contracts only, and accepted students and startups can get 12 months of Business free.

Granola doesn't sell transcription minutes, storage tiers, or credit packs. You pick a plan per user and that's the bill. Here's what each one includes, word for word from the pricing page.

Two things to notice. Business is the only plan most readers will ever weigh, since Basic and Enterprise sit at the two ends of the same question (do you need history, and does IT need control). And the $14 is a monthly price with no annual discount, because Granola only bills annually on Enterprise contracts. That changes how Granola compares to the other note-takers, which we'll get to below.

What the free plan actually caps

Granola's homepage puts it in one line. "Take as many notes as you'd like," then upgrade to view and work with notes older than 30 days. That's the whole restriction. There's no monthly meeting count, no minute allowance, and no clock that runs out after a couple of weeks.

So the free plan works like this. You open Granola before a call, it captures your laptop audio, you type your shorthand, and at the end it writes the summary. Same engine as the paid plan. You can do that for every meeting on your calendar, forever. Thirty days after a given meeting, that note drops out of view until you're on Business or Enterprise. The note isn't deleted. You just can't open it or run AI chat against it until you pay.

Basic also includes more than people expect from a $0 tier. AI chat within and across meetings, so you can ask questions of the last month of calls. Shared folders for collaboration. Custom templates, which is the feature that makes Granola's write-ups fit your work instead of a generic recap. Multi-language support. And the option to opt out of model training at any time, which matters if client calls run through it.

The catch shows up the first time you need something from six weeks ago. A client asks what was agreed in the kickoff. You want to check a number from a vendor call in the spring. You want AI chat to pull every mention of a project across a quarter. At that moment the 30-day window stops being an abstraction, and $14 starts looking like the price of your own memory.

Free vs Business, what you're paying for

Business at $14 per user per month doesn't change the note-taking. It changes what you can do after the note exists. Here's the line-by-line.

History is the reason most people upgrade. Integrations are the reason teams do. If your notes need to end up in Notion or HubSpot without a copy-paste step, Basic can't do it, and that's a workflow tax you pay on every single call. MCP and API access are the newer additions. MCP connects on every plan, but Basic reaches only your own notes from the last 30 days without transcripts. If you're running Claude or another assistant that can read your meeting notes over MCP, Business is the plan that unlocks full history plus the transcript and folder tools, and turns Granola into a data source rather than a document pile.

The advanced AI models line is harder to price. Granola doesn't say which models sit behind it. On our own account the difference shows up in longer, messier calls, where the paid write-up holds structure better. On a clean 30-minute one-on-one, we can't tell the two apart.

Enterprise, who it's for

Enterprise is $35 per user per month, two and a half times Business. None of it makes the notes better. It's about who controls them and how long they live. The pricing page lists enterprise-grade security and admin controls, SSO, priority support and usage analytics, organization-wide auto-deletion periods, admin controls for sharing and API access, and a team-wide model training opt-out.

• SSO. If your company runs Okta, Google Workspace SSO, or similar, IT will ask for this before approving any tool that hears client calls.
• Auto-deletion periods. Set organization-wide retention so meeting notes and transcripts delete on a schedule. Legal and compliance teams care about this more than anyone else in the building.
• Admin controls for sharing and API access. On Business, sharing and API connections are up to each user. Enterprise lets an admin decide who can share what and which apps can pull from the API.
• Team-wide model training opt-out. Basic and Business let each user opt out. Enterprise sets it once for everyone.

The way to decide is simple. If nobody at your company has asked for SSO or a retention policy, you don't need Enterprise yet. If someone has, Business won't get through the review, and $35 per user is the price of using Granola at all.

The break-even math

$14 a month means nothing until you frame it against your time. The question is how many minutes Granola has to save you in a month for the Business plan to pay for itself. Divide $14 by your hourly rate, multiply by 60, and that's the number.

Be honest about what that table measures, though. The write-up savings come from Granola itself, and Basic gives you the same write-up for free. What the $14 buys is history, models, and integrations. So the real break-even question for Business is narrower. Does searching old calls, skipping the copy-paste into Notion or HubSpot, and getting the better model on long meetings save you 17 minutes a month at $50 an hour? On our calls it does, mostly on the integrations. Every note that lands in the right place without a manual step is two or three minutes back, and that adds up across a week of meetings.

If you want the same exercise for dictation, our Wispr Flow pricing post runs identical math against a $15 plan, and the Wispr Flow vs Granola comparison covers why we pay for both.

How Granola pricing compares

Granola is the only one of the four big AI note-takers with no annual rate on its entry paid plan. Its billing help page says annual billing is for Enterprise contracts only, which makes the comparison lopsided depending on how you plan to pay. Every number below is from the vendor's own pricing page as of October 3, 2026.

Read it two ways. On monthly billing, Granola's $14 is the cheapest paid plan in the table. Otter is $16.99, Fireflies is $18, Fathom is $20. On annual billing the order flips. Otter drops to $8.33 and Fireflies to $10, both well under Granola's $14, and Fathom lands at $16. If you're the kind of buyer who pays a year up front, Granola is the mid-priced option, not the cheap one.

The free plans are where the products differ most. Fathom and Fireflies give you unlimited recording for free with limits elsewhere. Otter caps free at 300 minutes a month. Granola doesn't cap volume at all, it caps how far back you can look. Which free plan is better depends on whether you value quantity now or memory later. The full head-to-heads are in our Granola vs Otter, Granola vs Fathom, and Granola vs Fireflies posts, and if you're weighing a hardware recorder instead, Granola vs Plaud covers that.

Who should stay on Basic

• Anyone who uses the write-up the same week. If your notes turn into a follow-up email or a task list within days and you never reopen them, the 30-day window won't touch you.
• Solo operators with a low meeting count. Three or four calls a week is a lot of value from a $0 plan, and there's no meeting cap to worry about.
• People who keep notes elsewhere anyway. If you copy the summary into your own system after every call, you've already solved the history problem for free. You just pay in minutes instead of dollars.
• Anyone still deciding. Basic is the full note-taking engine. Run it on real calls for a month and the answer on Business will be obvious.

Who should pay for Business

• Consultants and founders who search old calls. The first time you need a decision from a kickoff two months ago, $14 is cheap.
• Anyone whose notes need to land in Notion, HubSpot, Attio, or Affinity. The integrations remove a manual step from every meeting, and that's where the break-even math actually closes.
• People running an AI assistant over their meetings. MCP and API access turn Granola into something Claude or a custom script can query. MCP connects on Basic too, but only to your own notes from the last 30 days without transcripts. Full history, transcripts, and the API are Business features.
• Small teams. Centralized billing and user management means one invoice and one place to add or remove seats.
• Anyone who bills $50 an hour or more. The break-even is under 17 minutes a month. That's one write-up.

Billing terms to confirm at checkout

The Granola pricing page shows per-user-per-month numbers and no billing toggle. Granola's billing help page fills in the rest. Basic and Business are billed monthly. Annual billing is available on Enterprise contracts only, arranged through Granola's sales team. So $14 a month is the number to budget for Business, with no annual discount to wait for.

• Business is monthly only. Otter, Fathom, and Fireflies all discount annual plans, which is why the comparison above changes so much between monthly and annual.
• Confirm the seat count before you add a team. Granola bills each workspace per active seat, so five seats on Business is $70 a month, not $14. Pending invitations don't count until someone joins.
• Downgrading hides old notes, it doesn't delete them. On Basic, notes older than 30 days are stored but not accessible in the app. Granola's docs say you can export a CSV of titles and summaries for your full history from Settings, then Profile, then Generate CSV.
• Paid trials have a hard stop. Granola runs time-limited trials of Business and Enterprise. When one ends you either subscribe or drop to Basic, with 30 days of history and Slack as the only integration.
• Students and startups get a year free. Granola offers 12 months of Business free to accepted students, who apply at granola.ai/students with an academic email, and to accepted startups through granola.ai/startups.

One footnote-level detail from the bottom of the pricing page. Granola contributes 1.5% of subscriptions to carbon removal through Stripe Climate. It doesn't change your price, and it isn't a reason to pick the tool, but it's there if you're the kind of buyer who reads the fine print.

The bottom line