Circleback, a Y Combinator-backed AI meeting notetaker, launched a free subscription plan that lets users transcribe unlimited meetings, though history access is capped at 30 days. Before this week, the company had no free option at all: its paid plans started at $20.83 per month. Now they start at $14 per month, billed annually, for customers who want full integrations, unlimited history and complete API and MCP access.
The free tier is not bare bones. It includes meeting recording, mobile and Apple Watch apps, AI querying of transcripts, and integrations with Linear and Slack. Granola introduced a similar 30-day history limit on its own free tier a few months earlier, according to TechCrunch, suggesting the structure is becoming a category norm rather than a Circleback invention.
Cofounder Ali Haghani told TechCrunch the change followed a sharp drop-off in signups caused by the company’s previously limited trial window. “If we just open the gates and allow more people to use the product, that’s gonna bring Circleback in front of more people,” he said. “Then we’re very good at making the product good and monetizing those users.”
Circleback, founded in 2023 by Haghani and Kevin Jacyna, took in $2.5 million during 2024 and reports having run profitably ever since. The company reports run-rate revenue above $1 million per employee across a team of eight, which works out to roughly $8 million in annualized revenue. It told TechCrunch it spends nothing on Google or Meta ads, treating the free tier itself as the marketing budget. According to Haghani there is investor interest but no active round, and that stance would only change if capital turned into the thing holding growth back.
The broader market backs up the urgency. Wispr, a dictation app, added its own notetaker in recent weeks. Calendly folded a similar tool into its scheduling product. Read AI and Fireflies have each raised outside funding to compete in the same category.
Transcription itself is close to a commodity at this point: Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams all now bundle meeting notes into subscriptions customers already pay for. A standalone notetaker’s real competition is not Granola or Fireflies, it is the free feature sitting inside a suite the customer never has to buy separately. Circleback’s free tier reads less like a shot at rival startups and more like a bid to stay visible against that bundling, using product access instead of ad dollars to keep the funnel open. Whether an eight-person team can sustain unlimited free transcription at scale, without disclosed unit economics on that tier, is the open question worth watching over its next few quarters.
TechCrunch reported this on August 31, 2026.
