21 August 2026
There's no single per-user number for AI meeting tools, because the bill is assembled from four separate charges: a seat license, a minutes allowance, storage for the recordings and transcripts, and — for most teams — a second subscription because the note-taker isn't the same product as the video call. Add those four up before you compare one vendor's headline price to another's.
A seat license usually buys access to the software — the ability to open the app, join calls, and see notes after the fact. It does not automatically mean unlimited AI transcription. Plenty of vendors sell the seat and meter the AI processing behind it separately, so the number on the pricing page is the floor, not the total.
Read the plan page for the phrase 'minutes included' or 'AI credits.' If it's there, the seat price is a starting point, and your real monthly cost depends on how many hours your team actually spends in meetings — which is usually more than anyone guesses until they check the calendar.
Most plans cap AI-processed minutes per seat or pool them across a workspace. Go over, and one of two things happens: you're billed a per-minute overage rate, or the transcription simply stops or drops to a lower-quality mode until the next billing cycle resets it. Neither is stated clearly on most pricing pages — it's usually in a fair-use clause, not the price table.
This matters most for the calls that already run long: client escalations, planning sessions that go 20 minutes over. Those are exactly the meetings you most want a clean transcript of, and exactly the ones most likely to hit a cap mid-sentence.
Recordings and transcripts accumulate whether anyone looks at them again or not. An hour of video can run several hundred megabytes, and a team doing forty hours of calls a week fills a storage tier fast. Vendors handle this with a retention window — 30 days, 90 days — after which recordings age out unless you're on a higher tier that pays for longer, or indefinite, retention.
This is the charge that's easiest to miss when comparing prices, because it doesn't show up until month three, when someone gets an email saying storage is nearly full and asks what the next tier costs.
A bot-based note-taker dials into a call hosted on Zoom, Meet, or Teams as a guest. That means the conferencing seat and the AI seat are two separate line items from two separate vendors, even though they're doing one job. Nobody budgets for this on purpose — it accumulates because the video platform was already there and the note-taker got added on top.
An AI-native meeting platform avoids this by putting the AI inside the call itself rather than dialing in from outside. AVAY is built this way: the meeting runs in the browser, the AI participant is already in the room, and there's one seat price rather than a conferencing bill plus a bot bill.
AVAY prices per seat, and that seat includes the AI participant — live notes, the transcript, search across every past meeting, and the mid-call coach on ⌘K. There's no separate note-taker subscription to layer on top, because the AI isn't a guest joining someone else's call.
This isn't free of trade-offs. A team with one person joining one call a month still pays a full seat, the same as someone in back-to-back meetings all day — there's no per-minute tier for light use. The current seat price is on avay.ai's pricing page rather than repeated here, because it's exactly the kind of number that changes and a stale figure on this page would be worse than none.
Skip the headline number and go straight to four questions: is the price per host or per every participant who joins; does the minutes cap apply per seat or pooled across the whole workspace; is retention beyond 30 or 90 days included or an add-on; and is the note-taking feature bundled into the seat or gated behind a separate tier. Those four answers, not the sticker price, are what your actual invoice will reflect.
| What one seat includes | What gets billed separately | |
|---|---|---|
| Bot added to an existing platform | Bot license, sometimes a limited minutes pool | Conferencing seat, storage tier, minutes overage |
| AI-native meeting platform | Meeting, transcription, notes, cross-meeting search, coach | Storage beyond the included retention window |
It depends on the architecture. Bot-based note-takers dial into Zoom, Meet, or Teams, so you're paying that conferencing seat plus the bot's seat separately. AI-native platforms like AVAY run the meeting and the AI as one product, so the seat price covers both.
Usually one of two things: you're billed a metered overage rate for the extra minutes, or transcription pauses or degrades until the next billing cycle resets the cap. This is almost always in a fair-use clause rather than the price table, so it's worth asking directly rather than assuming.
Rarely. Most plans set a retention window — commonly 30 or 90 days — and recordings age out after that unless you're on a tier that pays for longer retention. Video is heavy: an hour of recording can run several hundred megabytes, so a busy team fills a storage tier faster than expected.
Because the note-taker is a bot joining a call hosted on a different platform, which means one bill for the conferencing seat and a second for the bot seat. The structural fix is a platform where the AI participant is part of the meeting itself, not a guest dialing in from outside.
The number that matters isn't the seat price on the homepage — it's seat price plus minutes overage plus storage plus whatever second subscription the note-taker forces on you, so add all four before comparing vendors.
AVAY is a video meeting platform that transcribes the call itself — no bot joins, because there is nothing to join. Start one at avay.ai, read how each part works in the documentation, or see what it costs.