Fellow

What it is

Fellow is an AI meeting recorder and notetaker that sells on security and governance more than on note quality. It records through a bot on Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, or without one through its Mac and Windows desktop apps, and it turns the recording into a summary, action items, and a searchable transcript in 92 languages. Aydin Mirzaee, Amin Mirzaee, and Samuel Cormier-Iijima founded it in 2017 as a meeting-agenda tool. It has raised $30.5M, including a $24M Series A in 2021 led by Craft Ventures. In August 2025 the company moved from fellow.app to fellow.ai, and older links still redirect.

Why it shows up in ops stacks

• Procurement can answer its own questions from Fellow’s docs. It holds a SOC 2 Type II report covering Security and Confidentiality, audited every year since 2020 and shared under mutual NDA. It signs a BAA for HIPAA. It also commits in writing that it never trains AI models on customer meeting data, on every plan. That is the reason it wins evaluations where Fireflies or Granola stall in security review, not a better summary.
• Retention is a workspace policy. Admins set recording and transcript retention separately, down to Zero-Day Retention, which deletes the raw audio and transcript after AI processing and keeps the summary and action items. For a regulated team, that removes the transcript as a discovery and breach liability.
• Bot or no bot, per meeting. Botless capture runs on the desktop app across Zoom, Meet, Teams, Slack huddles, dialers, and in-person rooms. The iOS app covers meetings when no laptop is open. Users in your own org still see that the meeting is being recorded.
• MCP with write access and per-tool admin switches. The MCP server, live since January 2026, works with Claude (as a directory connector), ChatGPT, Cursor, and Copilot Studio. It reads summaries, transcripts, and action items, and it can write agendas. Admins enable each tool on its own, and every change is logged.
• Archiving hooks that regulated buyers ask for. Global Relay and Smarsh connectors sit next to Salesforce, HubSpot, Glean, Slack, and Notion.

Pricing

Per user per month, annual / monthly, checked 2026-10-10 at fellow.ai/pricing:

• Free — $0. 5 AI notes and 5 AI recordings per user, lifetime. Summaries, transcription, action items, Ask Fellow.
• Team — $7 / $11. 10 AI notes and 10 recordings per user per month, meeting automations, project-management, Notion and Confluence integrations, API access.
• Business — $15 / $23. Unlimited recordings, sales recap templates, org-wide templates, Salesforce and HubSpot sync, keyword tracking.
• Enterprise — $25, annual, 10-user minimum. SSO through Okta or OneLogin, user provisioning, domain control, advanced recording permissions, transcript redaction, AI-driven CRM field updates, security and legal reviews. HIPAA with a signed BAA sits here.

The number that matters is the Enterprise floor. Ten seats at $25 is $3,000 a year for HIPAA, SSO, and redaction. Fireflies puts HIPAA and SSO on its $39 Enterprise tier, so the same ten seats cost $4,680 there, about 56% more.

Best for

• RevOps, Legal Ops, and recruiting leaders whose last notetaker rollout died in security or procurement review
• Healthcare, fintech, and investment teams that need a BAA, enforced retention, and archiving to Global Relay or Smarsh in one contract
• Orgs that want meeting history readable by Claude or ChatGPT through MCP, with admin control over which tools are exposed

Alternatives — and when to pick them instead

• Fireflies.ai — one of the two category leaders by user base. Pick it when connector breadth matters more than governance and nobody needs a BAA: Business is $19 annual. Its AI features also draw on a credit pool, so model credits as well as seats.
• Otter.ai — the other leader. Pick it when transcription volume and an existing org license matter most. HIPAA is an add-on on its Enterprise quote, not a standard feature.
• Granola — the fastest-growing entrant. Pick it when the note-taking experience comes first and the team is mostly on laptops. Its Business tier at $14 is a dollar cheaper than Fellow Business, but it has no BAA path.
• Gong — pick it when the requirement is deal scoring, forecasting, and rep coaching. Fellow records and summarizes; it does not run a revenue-intelligence program.

Watch-outs

• Botless means consent is your job. Fellow’s own docs say providing a recording disclosure is your responsibility in botless mode, and recap emails are off by default for those recordings. External participants get no signal. Guard: use the bot for external calls in two-party-consent jurisdictions, and put a disclosure line in the invite template before rollout.
• Data lives in Canada, with no EU option. Fellow hosts on AWS Canada Central and documents no EU residency. Guard: EU and German buyers should get the DPA and the AI subprocessor list signed off by the DPO before the pilot, not after.
• Team’s caps break real usage. Ten recordings per user per month is about two a week, well short of a normal ops calendar. Guard: put anyone who records more than twice a week on Business at $15, and leave Team for occasional users.
• The compliance features are all one tier up. HIPAA, SSO, provisioning, and redaction sit on Enterprise, with a 10-seat minimum. Guard: if any of those is a hard requirement, budget the $3,000 floor from day one and run the pilot on Enterprise terms, so security review covers the tier you will actually sign.