Is Read AI Free? Free Plan Limits, 7-Day Trial and Cheaper Routes

Yes. Read AI has a permanent Free plan at $0, with no credit card and no time limit. The ceiling is tight, though: 5 meeting reports a month ^[1], and reports other people share with you count toward the same five ^[2]. Each meeting is capped at 1 hour, there are no upload minutes, and only basic integrations connect. Separately, every new account gets a 7-day Enterprise trial at sign-up and then drops to Free on its own. Our verdict: Free fits someone with a few short calls a month. One weekly meeting under an hour just fits the five, but only if nobody shares other reports with you. Two meetings a week, or any meeting past an hour, outgrows it.

What you get for $0, and what is missing

The Free plan is broader than the quota suggests. It covers the meeting assistant on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, the full meeting report with summary, chapters, action items and a transcript by speaker, the private Meeting Coach, and the Windows, macOS, iPhone and Android apps, where the same quota applies. Basic integrations mean your calendar, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Gmail or Outlook. The REST API and the MCP server, both in open beta, also work on Free. So does Ada, Read AI's email assistant, which schedules over email and never joins meetings.

The gaps are specific. Free has no Workspace, and a Free user cannot join one, because every member needs a paid license on the same plan. Premium integrations such as Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Confluence^[p1], Zapier and webhooks start on Pro, as do the OpenAI and Anthropic model options in Ask Read and Ask Read over Google Drive, OneDrive or a CRM. Email and messaging Readouts last only 14 days after your first connection. There is no playback. On Free, report text is kept at least a year and no longer than two, and recordings are deleted 180 days after the meeting.

How the five reports run out

The quota counts reports, not minutes. A 10-minute check-in and a long client call each use one of the five. Reports you own and reports someone shares with you both count, so a colleague who has Read and shares recaps with you can drain your month without you ever inviting the assistant ^[2]. From the sixth report on, the meeting still appears in your list but shows as Out of quota, with no transcript to read.

The hour cap works differently. When a Free meeting reaches 1 hour, Read leaves the call and builds the report from what it recorded up to that point. A 90-minute workshop on Free therefore yields a report on its first hour only. Upgrading rescues part of the damage, since Read reprocesses reports from the past 30 days and unlocks the ones marked Out of quota. Reports filed as Incomplete stay incomplete. So a paid plan bought mid-month can recover the earlier overflow, not every failed meeting.

One more trap sits in the defaults. Once a calendar is connected, Read joins every event on it and sends the recap to everyone with access, and on a busy calendar that can use all five reports in a few days. Our guide to removing Read AI shows how to narrow auto-join to meetings you host, or switch it off and add Read by hand. On Free, that choice decides which five meetings get a report.

The 7-day Enterprise trial is not the Free plan

These are two different things. Every new user gets 7 days of Enterprise, which starts automatically at sign-up and asks for no credit card ^[3]. When it ends, the account moves to Free on its own; nothing is charged, and a payment method is needed only if you want to keep Enterprise features. The trial can be started once per account. If yours has already lapsed, Read AI's route is to contact Sales and request a group trial.

For seven days you see Enterprise: unlimited reports, playback, video highlights, agents such as Monday Briefing and Topics, and integrations such as Zapier. One detail differs from a paid Enterprise plan. Trials include no upload minutes. And, as on every plan, Read joins all of your calendar meetings by default, so a week of trial can also be a week of recaps landing in colleagues' and clients' inboxes. Plan the week around meetings you actually want to judge. Pick them deliberately.

Two low-cost routes: EDU and Zoom Essential Apps

Students and staff at higher-education institutions can skip both Free's limits and Pro's price. EDU costs $60 a year per license and EDU + Video $100 a year per license, both billed annually only, with a .edu email verified by link. EDU works like Pro, with unlimited reports, 4-hour meetings and 100 upload minutes a month; EDU + Video adds playback, highlight reels and 200 minutes. Neither supports Workspaces or premium integrations such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier or webhooks. Only Free users or people in the Enterprise trial can sign up, so a Pro subscriber cannot switch down. Our Read AI for education guide covers classroom use.

If your company pays for Zoom One Pro, Business or Business Plus, Read's premium features come at no cost through Zoom Essential Apps ^[4]. The help center sets the terms: a separate Zoom Apps plan, free for 12 months, covering transcripts, summaries and real-time metrics for the first 5 meetings a month, recordings up to 60 minutes, participant insights and a Workspace for up to 10 users. Audio and video playback is not included. After 12 months the account downgrades to Free unless someone upgrades. Against Free, the gain is the Workspace, not more meetings.

When paying for Read AI is worth it

Free breaks on three triggers: a sixth meeting in a month, any meeting past an hour, or a recording you need to upload. Hit one of them regularly and the question becomes which plan, not whether. Pro costs $15 per user per month billed annually, or $19.75 per user per month billed monthly. Over a year that comes to $180 on annual billing or $237 on monthly, by our arithmetic, so annual billing saves $57 a year per user. Read AI labels the annual discount at 25 percent; on Pro it works out closer to 24 percent.

Annual only wins if you stay. Nine months of monthly Pro still cost less than one annual Pro year, and from the tenth month annual is cheaper; Enterprise crosses at the same nine-month line. Read AI does not offer refunds, and cancelling keeps access only until the paid period ends, so an annual plan abandoned after three months is money gone. Start monthly. Move to annual once the meeting habit is proven. Our Read AI pricing guide covers renewals and plan changes.

Enterprise makes sense when you need to hear or watch the meeting again. Enterprise costs $22.50 per user per month billed annually, or $29.75 per user per month on Enterprise billed monthly. The step up from Pro is $90 a year per user on annual billing or $120 on monthly. That buys playback, video highlights, 100 more upload minutes a month and prioritized support. Teams pay per head: every person in a Workspace needs a license, all on one plan, so five people on Pro come to $900 a year billed annually or $1,185 billed monthly, again by our arithmetic. For students the gap is wider. EDU at $60 a year saves $120 against annual Pro and $177 against monthly Pro.

How Read AI's free tier compares

Free tiers in this category meter different things, so compare the unit before the number. Otter's Basic plan meters minutes: 300 transcription minutes per user a month, with only the first 30 minutes of each conversation viewable until an upgrade. Granola's Basic plan allows unlimited meetings but shows only the last 30 days of history, and it uses no meeting bot. Fireflies.ai gives accounts created since September 2026 a fixed set of transcription credits at sign-up, with unlimited transcription only while calendar auto-join is on. Read AI meters reports: five a month, each up to an hour, shared ones included.

That difference decides the fit. Someone with many short calls runs through Read AI's five reports long before a minutes-based allowance would be spent. Someone with two or three long sessions a month hits the 1-hour cap instead, and loses the end of each meeting. Read AI's Free plan is strongest for a person who needs a handful of short meetings captured, plus unlimited Ask Read and free API access across them. For anything heavier, the trial week is the honest test.

The bottom line

Read AI is free in a real sense: $0, no card, no expiry. But the Free plan is a sampler, not a workspace. Five reports a month, shared ones included, and a 1-hour cap per meeting will cover an occasional call and little more. Use the 7-day Enterprise trial on a week of meetings you care about, narrow auto-join first, and then decide. Students should look at EDU before Pro; Zoom One Pro, Business or Business Plus subscribers should check Essential Apps. Everyone else with more than one meeting a week, or meetings past an hour, will end up on Pro, ideally billed monthly until the habit sticks.