Is Granola Free? The Basic Plan, Trials and the 30-Day Limit

Yes. Granola's Basic plan is free ($0 per user per month), needs no credit card and has no time limit.^[1] It covers unlimited meetings, with no meeting or minute caps, plus AI-enhanced notes, Chat and templates. The real limit is time, not volume: Basic shows only the last 30 days of notes in the app, and older notes stay stored but hidden until the workspace upgrades. The first paid step is Business at $14 per user per month, billed monthly, and Granola sells no annual Business plan. Free fits a person who works from this month's meetings. Anyone who needs an archive, integrations beyond Slack or the API should budget for Business.

What the free Basic plan actually includes

Basic is a working product, not a demo. You get AI meeting notes for unlimited meetings, captured from your device's microphone and system audio, with no bot joining the call. Your typed words stay black and the AI additions show in gray. Chat works within one meeting and across meetings on the Auto model, and you keep shared folders, custom templates, Recipes (saved prompts), voice typing, speaker tagging and multi-language support. The Mac and Windows apps are included, and the iPhone, Android and Apple Watch apps need no paid subscription either.

Some of the plumbing is free too. Slack is the one integration on Basic, and it needs a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account. The MCP server, which lets Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools read your notes, works on Basic for personal notes from the last 30 days, without transcripts. Each user can set transcript auto-deletion and opt out of model training. Two limits apply on every plan: the phone apps cannot capture Zoom, Meet or Teams audio, and Granola deletes audio after transcription, so there is no recording to replay. Our Granola review covers both.

How the 30-day history really works

The 30-day window is a visibility rule. It is not a deletion rule. On Basic, notes older than 30 days disappear from the app but stay stored, and they come back as soon as the workspace upgrades.^[2] The same window applies to every feature that reads your archive: Chat answers from the last 30 days only, MCP reaches personal notes from that period, and People and Companies builds its views on a 30-day rolling window. Inside the window nothing is rationed. No plan has a daily transcription limit.

Two doors still open onto older notes without paying. The CSV export in Settings covers the full history of the notes you own, even on Basic, with titles and summaries; the download link works for 24 hours, and each account can request one export every 24 hours. Note import between two Granola accounts with different emails also moves notes older than 30 days, with no upgrade needed on the old account. The CSV is a file to read outside the app, not an archive Chat can search.

There is also a short, paid way back in. Because hidden notes return on upgrade, one month of Business brings the whole archive back for $14 per user. Cancelling keeps the paid plan to the end of the billing period; then the workspace moves back to Basic, and anything older than 30 days hides again, still not deleted. A solo user who needs the archive for two months a year spends $28, against $168 for twelve paid months, by our arithmetic. Plan that month carefully.

What only the paid plans add

The free plan stops at features that touch other systems or need the full history. Business adds the Notion, Zapier, HubSpot, Attio and Affinity integrations, a workspace dictionary and centralized billing on top of the rows below. Enterprise adds SSO and SCIM for workspaces with 50 or more active members or a 50-seat commitment, HIPAA workspaces with a BAA arranged through sales, the Audit API and org-wide retention, sharing and training policies.

One of these gates surprises people. Follow-up email drafts work on a paid plan or an active trial, so a trial shows you a feature that Basic then removes. Both briefs and follow-up drafts also need a Google account today, since briefs read Google Calendar and follow-ups send through a Google mailbox. A team on Microsoft 365 should not count on those two when weighing the upgrade.

Trials and the four discount programs

Granola offers time-limited trials of Business and Enterprise. Granola does not publish the trial length. During a trial you get full access until the end date and an email before it ends; then you subscribe and pay, or the workspace moves to Basic. An expired trial is not charged. A promo code does not shorten a trial, and its discount applies to the first payment after it.

Students and startups

Accepted students and startups get 12 months of Business free, worth $168 per user by our arithmetic. Students must be currently enrolled at an accredited university in the US, UK or Canada, apply with an academic email and upload a student ID; each can refer up to five friends at the same university. Startups qualify after a pre-seed or seed round from Granola's list of 500+ approved investors, if the team never paid for Granola or used a promo code. Bootstrapped teams do not qualify. In both programs, finish the upgrade checkout in Settings > Billing after acceptance, or the account stays on the standard trial.

Nonprofits and referrals

Nonprofits verified through Goodstack get 50% off Business, which comes to $7 per user per month, billed monthly, or $84 a year saved per user, by our arithmetic.^[3] The discount applies automatically at checkout, with no promo code, when the workspace has no paid subscription yet and the same email is used. A tax-exemption certificate applies to future invoices only. The referral program gives a new user 2 months of Business, worth $28 per user by our arithmetic.^[4] That user must sign up with a company email, and their company must not already have a workspace.

What the first paid step really costs

Business costs $14 per user per month, billed monthly, so $168 a year by our arithmetic is simply twelve monthly charges. Billing works per workspace, and every active member, admins included, is a paid seat on the same plan. Anyone who joins by invite or domain auto-join is billed from the day they join, pro rata on the next invoice. Pending invitations are not billed, and sharing a note adds no seat. One workspace cannot mix Basic and Business members.

That rule shapes small-team budgets. A five-person workspace on Business costs $70 a month, or $840 a year by our arithmetic, even if only two people need the archive. Granola's documented answer is a split: a Business workspace for those who need it and a free one for the rest, though notes and folders are not shared across workspaces. Granola does not publish a refund policy for subscription fees, and cancelling runs to the end of the period. The Granola pricing guide covers Enterprise in full.

For context, here are first paid steps elsewhere. Otter Pro is $16.99 per user a month, billed monthly, with 1,200 minutes a month. Fireflies Pro is $18 per seat a month, billed monthly. By our arithmetic, Granola Business costs $2.99 a month less per user than Otter Pro and $4 less than Fireflies Pro on the same monthly term. The units differ, though: Granola caps no minutes and stores no audio.

How Basic compares with other free note takers

Free plans in this category ration different things. Otter's Basic plan gives 300 transcription minutes per user a month, with only the first 30 minutes of each conversation viewable until you upgrade. Fireflies' Free plan allows 3 meeting transcriptions by default for sign-ups from September 2026, a cap that turning on Auto-join of calendar meetings removes, plus 400 minutes of storage. Read AI's Free plan covers 5 meeting transcripts a month, meetings up to 1 hour, with no card. Otter and Fireflies both run 7-day Business trials that need a card and convert unless cancelled.

Granola's Basic trades history for volume. It caps neither meetings nor minutes, yet it hides anything older than 30 days and stores no audio at all. Someone with many meetings who works from recent notes hits no ceiling on Basic. Someone who needs a searchable archive, recordings to replay or file uploads will meet its edges fast, because Granola transcribes live meetings only and accepts no pre-recorded audio. That is the honest test.

The bottom line

Granola is genuinely free. Basic costs $0 per user per month with no card and no time limit, and it never counts your meetings or minutes; it only hides notes older than 30 days, which stay stored and return on upgrade. Start free, export your history as a CSV when you want a copy, and move to Business at $14 per user per month, billed monthly, once you need the archive, wider integrations or the API. Students, funded startups, nonprofits and referred users should check their program first.