AI recorders: what the subscription actually costs over two years

The hardware price is the smallest number on the page.

In this category the sticker price is the entry fee, not the price. Two people can buy the identical device and pay close to five times different amounts for it over two years — because the thing that decides the cost is which tier they end up on, and almost nobody works that out before they order. Below is every plan we could find a published price for, the two-year arithmetic done on those prices, and the specific places where the pricing page stops being the whole story.

What we did

We went through the vendors' own material rather than reviews of it: the pricing pages, the membership FAQs, the cancellation and refund terms, and the product pages for the hardware figures. Everything in the tables below is either a number a vendor prints on its own site or arithmetic done on those numbers. Where a figure is not published, the table says so instead of estimating it.

Prices were checked on 26 September 2026. They change often, and one of the devices below has already stopped being sold. The arithmetic method is the part worth keeping; the specific numbers are worth re-checking on the day you buy.

The three numbers that decide it

Almost every bad purchase in this category comes from looking at only the first of these.

1. The hardware price. A one-off payment, and in this category usually the smallest of the three.
2. What the free tier gives you per month. This is what the device does if you never pay again. It is the real baseline, not a trial.
3. The paid tier — and whether you pay monthly or annually. The gap between those two is not small. On one device below it is more than a factor of two.

Two years, priced out

Take a device at the top of this category. The hardware is $189.00. What you pay on top of that depends entirely on which path you take:

That is one device. The cheapest way to own it for two years costs $189.00; the most expensive costs $908.76. A spread of roughly 4.8×, decided by a dropdown on a pricing page that most buyers never scroll to.

For contrast, the same question asked of a software-only tool that runs on the phone you already own — so there is no hardware line at all:

Free tiers, converted into hours

“300 minutes a month” reads like a generous allowance. It is five hours. Spread across a working month that is about fourteen minutes a day, or under seven 45-minute meetings. The free tiers in this category are sized to demonstrate the product, not to run your working life on.

Note the third row. The most generous free tier we found in this category belonged to a device that is no longer sold — which brings us to the part of the cost that no pricing page contains.

Where the pricing page stops telling the truth

“Unlimited” has a ceiling

One vendor's own plan table defines its Unlimited tier as “up to 24 hours/day”. That is a daily cap, and it is stated plainly enough. But the word on the button is Unlimited, and a plan with a published ceiling is a metered plan with a high meter. Before paying for “unlimited” anywhere in this category, find the sentence that defines it.

Free minutes do not roll over

The same vendor's membership FAQ states that transcription minutes reset at the start of each billing month and that unused minutes do not carry over — on every plan, from the free tier up. A quiet month is a month you paid for and did not use. If your recording volume is lumpy, monthly billing plus top-ups can be cheaper than an annual plan sized for your busiest month.

Running out does not stop the recording

This is the detail that catches people. When the minutes are gone, only the transcription pauses. The device keeps recording, playback keeps working, and your files are still there — you simply cannot turn the new audio into text until the allowance resets or you buy more. Top-ups are sold in fixed packages rather than by the minute.

Practically, that means you can end a month holding several hours of audio you cannot read. The hardware did its job. The part you actually bought the device for did not.

The monthly and annual prices are not close

The same vendor's FAQ puts its Pro tier at $17.99/month billed monthly against $8.33/month on annual billing — a difference the vendor itself describes as 54% cheaper. Across two years that is $431.76 against $199.98 for identical access. Annual billing is a commitment to a product you may not have used yet, so there is a real trade-off; but if you have already decided, paying monthly is the expensive way to keep your options open.

Refunds depend on where you clicked

Refund terms in this category are split by purchase channel, and the split matters more than the policy. Where a subscription was bought through the Apple App Store, the vendor states it cannot process the refund at all — Apple holds the billing relationship and the decision. Activation codes are non-refundable once redeemed, with a 30-day window available only on codes that have not been used. In practice: the moment you redeem, your refund route narrows. Check which channel you are buying through before you buy, because you cannot change it afterwards.

Cancelling is easy, and your recordings stay

One point in the vendor's favour, and it is worth checking on any device you consider. The membership FAQ states that on cancellation, recordings and transcriptions are not deleted; the account simply reverts to the free Starter plan and existing material remains accessible. That is the outcome you want, and it is not universal in this category. Ask the question explicitly before you buy anything here: if I stop paying, do I still have my transcripts? A device that holds your notes hostage is a worse product than its specification suggests.

The failure mode that actually cost owners money

Everything above is about price. This part is about the assumption underneath every two-year calculation, which nobody writes down: that the service still exists in two years.

A pendant-style recorder launched at an introductory $99 with a free tier of 1,200 transcription minutes a month — the most generous allowance in the category, and a genuinely well-reviewed device. The company behind it had raised over $33m and was valued at $368m in 2023.

Meta acquired the company. The deal was announced on 5 December 2025. New sales stopped immediately. Existing owners were moved onto a free unlimited plan and given a support window rather than being cut off — a better outcome than most. But the companion desktop app's screen and audio capture was shut down on 19 December 2025, and the device left the market within roughly two years of its launch.

So price the subscription as a monthly decision you re-make, not a subscription you sign up to. And treat the hardware as a bet on the vendor: not on whether the company is good, but on whether the product line survives being acquired, shelved, or repositioned. Before buying into any of these ecosystems, look at how long the previous generation was supported. It is the only evidence available about the next one.

Who should buy what

• You record under 5 hours a month. Buy the hardware and stay on the free tier. Do not subscribe on day one. Your allowance covers it, and paying for capacity you are not using is the most common waste in this category.
• You record 5 to 20 hours a month. The annual Pro tier is the only tier where the arithmetic works: roughly $100 a year against roughly $216 a year for the same access billed monthly.
• You record over 20 hours a month. You are in the tier that costs more than the hardware every single year. Compare against a software-only tool first — one of the ones above is around $100 a year on its annual tier, with no hardware to replace later.
• You do not want a subscription at all. Then your real allowance is five hours a month, and you should decide whether that is enough before you buy, not after. If it is not, a software-only tool with a free tier is the honest answer.
• You should not buy any of these if the transcript is meant to be a permanent record and you have not checked the export format; or if you need the device to work without a connection and have not confirmed whether the processing happens on the device or on a server. Both of those are answerable before purchase and unfixable after.

The question we would ask before buying any of these

What does the device do with the account deleted and the subscription cancelled? For every device above, the honest answer is the same: it records, and you get about five hours of transcription a month, forever, for nothing.

That is a perfectly good product. It is just not the product the demo showed you — and once you know which one you are buying, the price stops being confusing. You are not buying a $189 recorder. You are buying a $189 recorder plus a decision, and the decision is the expensive part.

Sources

Every figure above comes from one of the following, read on 26 September 2026. Where a conclusion rests on arithmetic rather than a published number, it is labelled as such in the text.

• Hardware and plan prices, free-tier allowance, export formats: the vendor's own AI plan pricing page and the product page for the device.
• Rollover, top-ups, cancellation, refunds and what happens to recordings: the vendor's AI membership FAQ and its cancellation and refunds support article.
• Software-only plan prices and free-tier limits: that vendor's public pricing page.
• Free-tier minutes and how minutes are counted: the discontinued vendor's own pricing help article.
• Acquisition, halt of new sales, support window and app shutdown date: the acquiring company's announcement of 5 December 2025 and contemporaneous press reporting.

Where two pages published by the same vendor round a price differently by a cent or two, the table uses the figure printed alongside the annual billing option, since that is the number the checkout applies.