How Far Does Notta's Free Plan Actually Go? The 3-Minute Cap and What to Do About It

You uploaded the recording of a 40-minute customer call, and the transcript stopped after three minutes. No error message, nothing obviously broken.

Nothing is broken. That is the free plan working as designed.

The short version

Enterprise pricing is custom, starting at 51 seats.

The 3-minute stop is a spec, not a bug

Your monthly allowance and your per-recording cap are different things

The confusing part of the free plan is that time is limited twice over:

• Total transcription per month: 120 minutes
• Length of any single transcription: 3 minutes

Read the 120-minute figure alone and you would assume four 30-minute meetings fit comfortably. They do not. With a 3-minute ceiling on each pass, a 30-minute meeting never gets through in one piece. That gap is why "Notta stopped at 3 minutes" is such a common search.

To force a 30-minute meeting into the free tier, you would split the audio into ten 3-minute files and upload them one at a time. You have 50 uploads a month, so the count is not the problem. The problem is doing the splitting and then stitching ten fragments of text back together, every single time.

The cap sits on transcription, not on your recording

Here is the distinction worth holding onto. What you actually want usually breaks into two steps:

1. Capture the meeting (record it)
2. Turn the capture into text and pull out the key points (transcribe and summarize)

The free plan constrains step 2. If you handle step 1 some other way, nothing about the conversation is lost while you decide what to do about step 2. We come back to this below.

What the paid plans unlock

Pro: 5 hours per recording, 1,800 minutes a month

For one person recording meetings, this is the plan that removes the wall. The per-recording ceiling goes from 3 minutes to 5 hours, so length stops being a consideration. The 1,800 monthly minutes work out to 30 hours.

Business: unlimited transcription, multiple seats

Transcription becomes unlimited and you can add seats for a team. Annually it is $16.67/month per user ($199.99/year), or $27.99 billed monthly. The 5-hour per-recording ceiling is the same as Pro.

Most individuals never exhaust Pro's 1,800 minutes, so start there unless you are setting up a shared team archive.

What the free plan is genuinely good for

After all that, the free tier is a solid way to evaluate the product. Notta's own pricing table lists these as available on the free plan:

Free stays practical for anything that fits in three minutes:

• Short calls and huddles you want a text record of
• Dictating a thought and getting it back as text
• Recording your own 3-minute recap right after a meeting
• Testing transcription accuracy before you commit

What it is not designed for is putting a whole meeting through. Push on that and the splitting takes longer than writing the notes by hand.

How to keep long meetings without paying

1. Record the meeting on your own machine

Capture screen and audio on the computer you are already sitting in front of. With a tool that has no time limit, a 40-minute call or a 2-hour workshop is kept in full, entirely outside the transcription allowance.

2. Summarize with a free AI

Once you have text, general-purpose chat AI handles summarizing perfectly well. The prompts and the workflow are written up already:

• Meeting minutes prompts for ChatGPT
• How to write meeting minutes with Gemini, even for a one-hour meeting

There is no subscription in this route. There is still handling: open the file, hand it to the AI, save the output somewhere. For one or two meetings a week that is fine.

3. When the handoff itself becomes the chore

• Recording is free with no time limit, and no watermark
• Your voice and the other side's audio are both captured with no virtual audio driver (no BlackHole setup)
• On the Pro plan, AI generates the minutes from the recording and sends them straight to Notion

By the time the meeting ends, what you have is searchable text rather than another video to watch. Pro is free for the first month, no credit card required.

One caveat: Qureco is macOS only, with no Windows version. If you are on Windows, take this option off the table. It also does not display live captions during a call, so if you need text on screen while people are talking, that is not what this is for.

When Notta is the right answer anyway

Notta is widely used for good reasons, and some of them have no substitute in a local recording setup.

Deciding whether to pay

Two questions decide it: do you need text in real time, and can you record the meeting on your own device? Two noes usually mean the free route is enough.

FAQ

Is anything saved past the 3-minute mark?

Transcription ends at three minutes on the free plan and the rest does not become text. The audio file itself, if you have one locally, is untouched.

Do unused monthly minutes roll over?

No. Treat 120 minutes as a monthly allowance.

Does the free plan expire?

It is not a time-limited trial. You can stay on it indefinitely, with the 120-minute, 3-minute and 10-summary caps always in place.

Could I just cut the audio into 3-minute pieces?

Technically yes, and you have 50 uploads a month to work with. A 30-minute meeting becomes ten files, an hour becomes twenty, and you also have to reassemble the text each time. Workable a few times, unpleasant as a routine.

Can I use Notta's bot on the free plan?

Notta does have a bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and Webex to capture meetings. The 3-minute per-conversation cap applies to transcription overall, so the free tier is not built to carry a whole meeting through that route. Plan details change, so check Notta's help center before you build a workflow on it.

Can I move my Notta data into Qureco?

There is no bulk import. Leave existing transcripts where they are and switch over for meetings going forward. Running both side by side is common.

How much of Qureco is free?

Screen recording and audio recording are free with no time limit and no watermark. AI minutes and Notion export are Pro features, and Pro is free for the first month with no credit card.

Glossary

Summary

• Notta's free plan runs two limits at once: 120 minutes a month and 3 minutes per conversation. A long meeting will not pass in one go even with allowance left
• Stopping at three minutes is the spec, not a fault. The constraints are volume and duration; the features themselves are all testable for free
• Pro removes the wall at $8.17/month billed annually ($13.99 monthly), with 5 hours per recording
• The 3-minute cap sits on transcription. Capture the meeting on your own machine and you can choose how to summarize it afterwards
• Live captions, bot capture, Windows and mobile point to Notta. Keeping Mac meetings readable after the fact is well served by local recording plus AI summarizing

Hitting a free tier tells you something useful about what you wanted from the tool in the first place: text during the meeting, or a record you can read afterwards. Answer that and the pricing question answers itself.

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