The Y Combinator-backed, profitable meeting-notes startup opens a free plan on August 31, 2026, betting that letting more people record meetings for nothing is cheaper than buying ads.
2026-08-31 · by Moe Ameen
Circleback, an AI meeting notetaker founded in 2023 by Ali Haghani and Kevin Jacyna, introduced a free subscription tier on August 31, 2026. The free plan lets anyone transcribe an unlimited number of meetings, with the catch that history is capped at the most recent 30 days. It also includes the mobile and Apple Watch apps, the ability to query transcripts with AI, and Slack and Linear integrations. Until now Circleback was paid-only with just a trial.
The company reworked its paid plans at the same time. Paid subscriptions now start at $14 per month billed annually — down from a previous entry price of around $20.83 per month — with higher tiers unlocking unlimited meeting history, the full integration catalog, and complete API and MCP access. Circleback's core product records virtual meetings across the usual platforms and in-person conversations, transcribes them with speaker labels in over 100 languages, and extracts and assigns action items automatically.
The strategy is the story. Haghani framed the free tier as the company's marketing channel: "If we just open the gates and allow more people to use the product, that's gonna bring Circleback in front of more people." The startup says it spends nothing on Google or Meta ads. It's an unusual position to give product away from — Circleback is Y Combinator-backed, raised about $2.5 million in 2024, has been profitable since 2024, and reports run-rate revenue exceeding $1 million per employee on an eight-person team. Treat the exact prices and limits as the launch-day figures; confirm the current plan details on Circleback's pricing page before quoting them.
A free Circleback account quietly builds the thing creators are always short on: a steady stream of real, in-your-own-words source material. Every sales call, customer interview, advisory chat, and team debrief becomes a speaker-labeled transcript. The problem is that a transcript is inert — and on the free tier it disappears after 30 days. [Kompozy](/) is the layer that turns that spoken record into published content before it ages out. Paste a Circleback transcript in as a source, and Kompozy pulls the sharp moments into finished posts: a [Persona Short](/glossary/persona-shorts) that narrates your best line on camera with a face-locked avatar, a brand-exact [Carousel](/glossary/hyperframes) that walks through the framework you explained to a customer, [Quote Graphics](/glossary/output-buckets) that lift the one sentence worth remembering, plus a Blog Article and Email Newsletter for the audience that wants the long version.
Everything is rewritten under your [Persona Brief](/glossary/persona-brief) so a rambling call becomes on-brand copy in your voice, not a raw dump. Then [Autopilot](/glossary/autopilot) schedules and publishes the set across the eight social platforms plus blog and email behind a per-post review. The workflow is a standing habit: after each meeting worth mining, one transcript in, a week of content out — so the archive Circleback now hands out for free actually leaves your feed, instead of expiring quietly at day 30.
Circleback added a free tier on August 31, 2026. It lets you transcribe an unlimited number of meetings but keeps only the most recent 30 days of history, and it includes the mobile and Apple Watch apps, AI transcript querying, and Slack and Linear integrations. Paid plans (from $14/month billed annually) add unlimited history, all integrations, and full API and MCP access.
Transcription itself is unlimited, but the free plan only retains the last 30 days of meeting history, and the broader integration catalog plus full API/MCP access are reserved for paid tiers. If you want to keep or reuse older transcripts, you either upgrade or export them before they roll off.
At launch, paid plans started at $14 per month billed annually, down from a previous entry price of about $20.83 per month, with higher tiers adding unlimited history, the full integration set, and complete API and MCP access. Confirm current pricing on Circleback's site, as launch figures change.
A transcript is raw source material, not a finished post. Creators feed it into a content engine like Kompozy, which rewrites the best moments in their brand voice and generates captioned short-form video, carousels, quote graphics, a blog, and a newsletter, then publishes across eight social platforms plus blog and email — so a recorded call becomes a week of content.