A free Otter.ai alternative with no monthly minute cap
Otter.ai's free tier meters your minutes each month and caps how long a single recording can run. Here is what that looks like, and an alternative with nothing to meter.
What Otter.ai does well
Otter.ai is a well-established transcription service with live transcription during meetings, speaker labels, and integrations with Zoom, Google Meet and Teams that go well beyond converting a single file. For ongoing meeting notes with speaker attribution, it does a job a plain file transcriber does not attempt.
Why people look for an alternative
As of October 2026, per otter.ai/pricing, the free Basic plan lists 300 transcription minutes a month, a 30-minute maximum per conversation and 3 lifetime audio or video file imports. Pro (listed at $8.33 per user per month, with the annual toggle) raises those to 1,200 minutes a month, 90 minutes per conversation and 10 file imports a month. For someone who wants to transcribe an occasional long interview or a batch of old voice memos, hitting the file-import or minute limit partway through is the usual friction.
What changes with a browser-based tool
Stayput's transcribe tool runs Whisper directly in the browser tab, so there is no monthly minute budget and no per-recording length cap beyond what your device can hold in memory: drop an MP3, WAV, M4A, MP4 or MOV file and it downloads the speech model and its engine once, then transcribes entirely on your device into plain text, SRT subtitles for video, or WebVTT captions. There is no account and no subscription, because a tenth file costs nothing more to process than the first.
Where Otter.ai still has the edge
Otter's pricing page lists live transcription, speaker identification and Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet support (as of October 2026), which are beyond what a single-file browser tool does. For transcribing files you already have, without a monthly limit, a local tool covers the common case.
Questions
What is Otter.ai's free plan limit?
As of October 2026, per otter.ai/pricing, the free Basic plan lists 300 transcription minutes a month, a 30-minute maximum per conversation and 3 lifetime audio or video file imports.
Is there a transcription tool with no monthly minute cap?
Yes. A tool that runs the transcription model in your browser, like Stayput's, has no server-side minutes to meter, so there is no natural reason to cap monthly use.
Does a free Otter.ai alternative include speaker labels?
Not the browser-based ones generally, including Stayput's: they write what was said, not who said it. Otter's speaker labelling remains an advantage for meeting notes specifically.
Can I get subtitles from an Otter.ai alternative?
Yes, Stayput's transcribe tool can output SRT subtitles or WebVTT captions timed to the speech.