Recall.ai
API platform for recording, transcribing & extracting meeting data at $0.50/hr
Recall.ai is the most reliable meeting recording API for developers who need perfect diarization and professional recordings. At $0.50/hour with no platform fees, it's cheaper than building in-house. Skip if you need a turn-key app without coding.
- Building AI meeting note-takers for healthcare/legal needing perfect diarization
- Creating sales coaching tools requiring separate audio streams
- Developing compliance recording solutions with 99.9% uptime SLA
- Enabling custom meeting bots for internal productivity
- Teams needing a turn-key meeting recording app with UI (use Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai)
- Projects requiring non-macOS desktop recording (only macOS SDK available)
- Very low-volume use (under 5 hours/month) where simpler tools suffice
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Skip Recall.ai if you need a ready-to-use meeting recording app with a user interface — this is a developer API, not a turn-key product.
Built-in transcription costs an extra $0.15 per hour of recording on top of the $0.50/hr base rate.
At $0.50 per hour with no platform fees, Recall.ai is cheaper than building your own meeting recording infrastructure. For early-stage startups, the Pay As You Go plan scales with usage. Larger teams may find volume discounts on custom plans. Competitors like Symbl.ai or Rev.ai charge per minute for transcription; Recall.ai's base rate only covers recording.
In short
Recall.ai — API platform for recording, transcribing & extracting meeting data at $0.50/hr. Best for Building AI meeting note-takers for healthcare/legal needing perfect diarization, Creating sales coaching tools requiring separate audio streams, Developing compliance recording solutions with 99.9% uptime SLA. Plans from $0.5/mo.
What's new in Recall.ai
Checked 13 days agoAcross the latest 5 updates: 1 pricing change and 4 news mentions.
How I built a botless meeting recorder from scratch
Tutorial on building a botless desktop recorder for Google Meet using Electron, Swift, and macOS APIs.
Recall.ai and Zoom partner to help companies build with meeting data
Partnership announcement to use Zoom RTMS for recording integrations.
How developers can get real-time transcripts programmatically
Guide on using Recall.ai APIs to obtain real-time transcripts from meetings.
What is speaker diarization, and how do you get transcripts with labels?
Explains speaker diarization and methods to generate labeled transcripts via Recall.ai.
New Recall.ai Pricing for 2026: $0.50 per Hour of Meeting Recording
Updated pricing lowers to $0.50 per recording hour, removes platform fees.
Viability Score
How likely is Recall.ai to still be operational in 12 months? Based on 4 signals — momentum (how recently it shipped), wrapper dependency, revenue model, and web presence.
Last calculated: July 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Meeting Bot API (bot joins calls to record)
- Desktop Recording SDK (macOS, botless)
- Calendar API (meeting metadata)
- Mobile Recording SDK (coming soon, phone calls & in-person)
- 100% accurate speaker diarization via separate audio streams
- Separate participant audio and video streams
- Real-time and async transcripts
- MP4 recordings with speaker and gallery view
- Send and read chat messages during meetings
- Breakout room support
- Recording consent management
- 99.9% uptime SLA (Enterprise)
- Built-in transcription ($0.15/hr extra)
- Integrate in 24 hours with few lines of code
- Storage: 7 days free, then $0.05/hr per 30 days
About Recall.ai
Recall.ai is a developer-focused API platform that provides tools to record, transcribe, and extract metadata from video conferences, phone calls, and in-person meetings. Used by over 3,000 customers across legal, healthcare, and enterprise teams, it offers four core products: the Meeting Bot API (a bot joins calls to record), the Desktop Recording SDK (botless macOS recording), the Calendar API (meeting metadata), and the Mobile Recording SDK (coming soon, for phone calls and in-person meetings). Key features include 100% accurate speaker diarization via separate audio streams, professional-grade MP4 recordings with speaker and gallery view, real-time and async transcripts, breakout room support, and a unified API returning 100+ data points per meeting. Pricing is usage-based at $0.50 per hour of recording with 5 free hours to start, plus built-in transcription at $0.15/hr. The platform recently lowered pricing and removed platform fees, making it cheaper than building in-house. Integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoToMeeting, Slack Huddles, and more. Unlike generic screen-recording APIs, Recall.ai provides separate participant audio/video streams and perfect diarization, ideal for compliance, healthcare, and sales coaching. Developers need coding skills to integrate; there is no built-in UI. With a 99.9% uptime SLA on Enterprise and SOC 2/HIPAA compliance, it's trusted for high-stakes use cases.
Behind the Verdict
Recall.ai is a strong pick for engineering teams that need to embed meeting recording into their own product—whether that's an AI note-taker, a sales coaching tool, or a compliance recorder. The separate audio streams and perfect diarization are genuinely unique; most competitors mix everyone into one track, which breaks speaker attribution in noisy calls. The pricing is transparent and refreshingly simple: $0.50 per recording hour, plus optional transcription at $0.15/hr. For a startup handling 1,000 hours/month, that's $500—far less than building the plumbing yourself. But it's not for everyone. There is no user-facing app—you write code against the API. If your team lacks the engineering chops or you just want 'record this meeting' as a feature, use Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai instead. Also, the Desktop Recording SDK is macOS-only right now; Windows support is absent. And the Mobile Recording SDK is still 'coming soon.' For high-volume users, volume discounts are available but require talking to sales. Overall, we'd choose Recall.ai when we need best-in-class recording infrastructure and have the dev resources to integrate it.
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Recall.ai actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
You integrate Recall.ai's Meeting Bot API to join sales calls on Zoom. Within 24 hours, you start receiving diarized transcripts and separate audio streams.
Outcome: You can analyze pitch delivery per speaker, generate call summaries, and surface coaching insights without building recording infrastructure from scratch.
You use Recall.ai's Desktop Recording SDK to record patient consults on a macOS app without a bot. You enable HIPAA BAA on the Enterprise plan.
Outcome: You get compliant recordings with perfect speaker diarization, auditable for regulatory needs, in under a week of development.
You call Recall.ai's Calendar API to fetch meeting metadata and trigger bot joins for user research interviews on Google Meet.
Outcome: Every interview is automatically recorded and transcribed, with speaker labels, saving your team hours of manual note-taking.
Use Cases
- Build a meeting bot that joins Zoom calls and returns diarized transcripts in real-time.
- Integrate meeting recording into a CRM to automatically log call summaries and action items.
- Create a desktop app that records and transcribes in-person meetings without a bot.
- Analyze sales calls by extracting speaker-separated audio for sentiment or keyword analysis.
- Develop an AI avatar that displays in meetings and interacts with participants.
- Build a compliance recording solution for regulated industries like finance or healthcare.
- Automate interview notes for recruiting or user research teams.
- Create a notetaker for advisors or consultants that logs meeting outcomes.
Limitations
- Free storage is limited to 7 days; extended storage costs $0.05/hr per 30 days.
- Built-in transcription incurs an extra $0.15/hr.
- Mobile SDK is 'Coming Soon' and not yet available.
- Desktop Recording SDK is macOS-only; Windows and Linux are not supported.
as of 2026-06-29
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Recall.ai tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Pay As You Go
$0.50/hr
Ideal for
Early-stage startups building a proof of concept with low and variable volume.
What this tier adds
Starting tier with 5 free hours, then $0.50/hr; no commitment, no platform fees.
Launch
Custom
Ideal for
Companies launching a product that need US, EU, or JP data residency and whiteglove support.
What this tier adds
Adds data residency choice and Slack-based whiteglove support over Pay As You Go.
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Large enterprises requiring SSO, contractual SLAs, HIPAA BAA, and custom terms.
What this tier adds
Adds SSO, 99.9% uptime SLA, custom contract redlining, and HIPAA compliance over Launch.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Recall.ai's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
At $0.50 per hour with no platform fees, Recall.ai is cheaper than building your own meeting recording infrastructure. For early-stage startups, the Pay As You Go plan scales with usage. Larger teams may find volume discounts on custom plans. Competitors like Symbl.ai or Rev.ai charge per minute for transcription; Recall.ai's base rate only covers recording.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Recall.ai — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
For the Meeting Bot API, you can integrate in 24 hours with a few lines of code using the quickstart. The Desktop Recording SDK requires macOS development skills and a couple of days to embed into your app. Calendar API setup takes a few hours. No UI is provided; you build the frontend yourself.
Switching to or from Recall.ai
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From an in-house solution: Replace custom recording logic with Recall.ai's API and cut months of development time.
- →From Nylas Notetaker: Switch to Recall.ai for lower cost and better diarization accuracy.
- ↗To a turn-key app: Migrate your data and users to Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai if you no longer want to maintain a custom UI.
- ↗To a self-hosted solution: If you need on-premise recording, consider open-source alternatives like Jitsi recording APIs.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Official links
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Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Recall.ai, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
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