Upgrade pages are written as if paying settles it. You pick a tier, the locks come off, and the product you were shown on the marketing page is the product you get. That is the implied bargain of every pricing card ever published.
It does not survive contact with the comparison tables underneath. On two of the biggest AI note-takers, the four controls a careful buyer actually wants — single sign-on, user provisioning, HIPAA and control over how long recordings are kept — sit on a rung most buyers cannot reach. One of them sells a plan literally named Enterprise that does not include them. The other will not say what its top tier costs.
Neither of those is a hidden fee or a dark pattern. Both are disclosed, in the vendor’s own table, on a page anyone can open. They are simply disclosed in the one place nobody reads as carefully as the card with the price on it.
Quick Verdict
Read AI has the broadest platform spread and the only published retention ceiling here. But its tier named Enterprise, at $22.50 per seat, em-dashes SSO, SCIM, HIPAA and retention control in Read AI’s own table. All four live a rung higher, on Enterprise+, which requires five licences.
Fathom has the strongest free plan in this category and the only training opt-out. Those same four controls sit on Enterprise, the one tier with no published price at all.
AmyNote gates nothing, because it has one plan: $19.99 a month, flat, per account rather than per seat. It also does not offer SSO, SCIM or HIPAA at any price, and that belongs in the same sentence rather than a footnote.
What We Compared
Each vendor’s pricing cards and full plan comparison table, parsed cell by cell rather than read as marketing copy, plus the training and retention clauses in each privacy policy. Every figure below comes from the vendors’ own pages, read on 2026-09-13.
One note on method, because it shapes everything that follows. The question is not “which product has the most features” but “what does the tier you can actually buy contain.” Those are different questions, and a feature matrix answers the second one only if you read across the columns instead of down them. A row that is present in the table and em-dashed in every affordable column is a feature the vendor has, and not a feature the buyer gets.
Read AI: Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths. Read AI runs on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Chrome, joins Zoom, Teams and Meet, and captures in-person meetings from its mobile apps. All four tiers carry a published USD price: Free, Pro $15 per seat billed annually, Enterprise $22.50, Enterprise+ $29.75. It is also the only vendor here publishing a retention ceiling, storing audio and video “in no case for longer than 2 years.”
That last point earns more credit than it usually gets. A published ceiling is a commitment a customer can quote back; an unpublished one is a posture. Read AI is the only product on this page that hands a reader a number specific enough to hold it to.
Weaknesses. Pro buys unlimited transcripts, but not audio or video playback, which starts a tier up. And Enterprise is where the naming stops matching the table: the row “Enterprise SSO + SAML” is em-dashed in the Enterprise column, along with SCIM, HIPAA and the Data Retention Policy control.
Read that back slowly, because it is the single strangest fact in this comparison. A plan named Enterprise cannot do single sign-on. The word on the card is doing work the cells underneath do not support, and a buyer who reasons from the tier name alone — which is what tier names are for — will reach the wrong conclusion and pay $22.50 per seat to get there.
All four controls unlock only on Enterprise+, which requires five licences, putting the cheapest configuration that carries Read AI’s own HIPAA claim at $148.75 a month billed annually. The seat floor is the operative constraint, not the per-seat price: every licence in a Workspace must sit on the same plan, so you cannot buy a single Enterprise+ seat for the one person who needs HIPAA. And there are no refunds.
One cap never lifts at any price. “30 meetings measured per month” sits under every card, Enterprise+ included. Whatever that metering does on Read AI’s side, it is the one number on the page that paying more does not move.
Fathom: Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths. Fathom’s free plan is the most generous in this category, and it is not bait: unlimited recordings, transcription and storage, kept forever. Paid tiers are cheap — $16 for Premium and $15 per seat for Team billed annually — and Fathom transcribes 38 languages.
It is also the only vendor here with a real training opt-out. Its policy says it may train in-house models on de-identified meeting content, then adds: “You can opt out from this use of your data in your account settings.” Critically, that opt-out is not tier-gated. On a page this full of rungs, the one control that matters to every user regardless of spend is available to all of them, and Fathom deserves the credit for where it chose not to put a lock.
Weaknesses. Almost everything else is gated. Fathom’s table runs 41 rows across five tiers, and nine sit in the Enterprise column only — among them custom data retention, single sign-on, Okta SCIM and HIPAA signed BAA. Enterprise is the one column priced as “Talk to sales.”
This is a different failure from Read AI’s, and arguably a worse one for a small buyer. Read AI’s compliance tier is expensive and knowable: $148.75 a month, five licences, decide accordingly. Fathom’s is not expensive so much as unknown. You cannot budget against “talk to sales,” you cannot compare it, and you cannot rule it out without spending a week of somebody’s attention to discover a number the vendor already has.
Below that, CRM field sync needs Business at $25 per seat with a two-seat minimum, and basic CRM sync on every cheaper tier is capped at three users per domain. That cap deserves reading twice, because it is indexed to your domain rather than your bill: a six-person team paying for six seats syncs three.
And no tier buys the room. Fathom’s help center, edited in late August 2026, still says in-person capture is “coming soon” with a waitlist. The documented workaround is starting a Zoom call in the room, and it carries its own warning: Fathom cannot tell apart speakers in the same room, so all audio is attributed to one name. For anyone whose meetings happen at a table rather than on a grid, that is not a gap in a tier, it is a gap in the product. Its privacy policy names no retention period either, storing data “for as long as necessary.”
AmyNote: Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths. There is no ladder to climb. AmyNote is $12.99 a week, $19.99 a month or $99 a year as a flat account price, not per seat, every feature included, no minimum licence count. A five-person team pays what one person pays. It transcribes 140+ languages, translates into 100+, and records in-person conversations today rather than from a waitlist. Its security page states that it does not train AI models on your data, does not sell meeting content, and does not require an account to use core features.
Weaknesses. Held to this article’s own standard, AmyNote loses rows too, and it loses them plainly. It publishes no SOC 2, no ISO 27001, no HIPAA and no GDPR certification — so what the other two gate behind a top tier, AmyNote does not sell at all. There are no team or admin features. It is iOS only, with no Android or desktop build. There is no free tier, only a 3-day trial.
Local-first is also not local-only: when transcription or AI analysis runs, audio or text is uploaded and processing copies may be retained. AmyNote does not claim TLS is end-to-end encryption. Those are real limits, and they are the reason this comparison does not end in a clean sweep — a buyer with a compliance requirement should read the paragraph above and stop reading.
Side by Side
- Cheapest tier with SSO. Read AI Enterprise+, five licences. Fathom Enterprise, unpriced. AmyNote never.
- Retention. Read AI publishes a 2-year ceiling, with auto-delete gated to Enterprise+. Fathom publishes no period, control gated to Enterprise. AmyNote publishes none either.
- Training. Read AI trains under legitimate interest, no opt-out. Fathom trains on de-identified content, with an opt-out on every tier. AmyNote does not train on your data.
- Seat rules. Read AI: five-licence floor on top, one plan level per Workspace, no refunds. Fathom: two-seat minimum on Team and Business. AmyNote: no seats.
- In-person meetings. Read AI captures them from its mobile apps. Fathom cannot yet, at any price. AmyNote is built for them.
Read that list as a whole and a pattern shows up that no single row states. On the two per-seat products, the controls a small, careful buyer wants are consistently one rung above the tier a small buyer would choose — not because the features are expensive to provide, but because compliance rows are what makes an enterprise column worth having. The pricing is working as designed. It is just designed for somebody else.
The Bottom Line
Choose Fathom if you want the best free plan in the category and have zero compliance requirements. Choose Read AI for the widest platform coverage, if you can field five licences. Both are capable products, and both put the controls a small team wants on a rung priced for somebody else.
Choose AmyNote if the gating itself is the problem: one flat price at amynote.app, everything included, no tiers to climb. Transcription runs on OpenAI’s latest Speech API, analysis on Anthropic’s Claude Opus, both contractually barred from training on your data. The 3-day trial needs no credit card. Check the honest list first: iOS only, no compliance certification.
Originally published as an X Article by @AmyNoteApp.
