Read AI vs Avoma vs AmyNote 2026: Who Are You Actually Paying For?

A ten-person team buys a meeting assistant. Three of them run customer calls every day. The other seven only need to read the notes afterwards. What decides the invoice is not the seat price on the card but which of those ten people the vendor counts as a seat.

Seat rules are easy to skim past because every pricing page leads with a per-seat number. But a $15 seat charged to ten people costs more than a $19 seat charged to three. We compared Read AI, Avoma and AmyNote on that one question, using figures read off the vendors’ own pages on 9 October 2026.

Quick Verdict

• Avoma if a few people record and many people read. It charges only for recorder seats, and its pricing page says “Viewers and Collaborators are always free.”
• Read AI if everyone on the team records their own meetings and you want a permanent free plan to start on. Every Workspace member needs a paid licence.
• AmyNote if you are one person recording in-person conversations on an iPhone. It is the cheapest paid option for one user, and it has no team workspace at all.

What We Compared

We looked at four things:

• Who pays. Recorders, readers, admins, or everyone in the workspace.
• The solo price. Year one for one person on annual billing.
• The team price. Year one for the ten-person team above.
• The compliance floor. The cheapest configuration that includes HIPAA and SSO.

The first one drives the other three. A vendor that bills every member makes the team price scale with headcount. A vendor that bills only recorders makes it scale with the number of people actually running meetings, which is usually far smaller.

Read AI: Every Workspace Member Is a Licence

Strengths. Read AI joins Zoom, Teams and Meet, and has Windows, macOS, iOS and Android apps. Its free plan is “Always free, no credit card required” and covers 5 meeting transcripts per month, with meetings up to 1 hour. Pro is $15 per user per month billed annually, or $19.75 monthly, with unlimited transcripts and 4-hour meetings. It publishes a retention ceiling: audio and video are kept “in no case for longer than 2 years.”

Weaknesses. The FAQ is plain about seats: “All our licenses are individual. If you want to create a workspace, you will need to buy a license for each person you invite.” It adds that “Free users cannot be part of a Workspace,” that there are no admin-only licences, and that “all licenses in a Workspace have to be on the same plan.” A manager who only wants to read the team’s notes is a full licence, on the same tier as everyone else.

Pro does not include audio or video playback; that starts at Enterprise, $22.50 per user per month annually. HIPAA, SSO and SCIM are Enterprise+ only, which “REQUIRES 5+ LICENSES” at $29.75 each. Its Read Score involves “analyzing facial and verbal elements of all meeting attendees,” which is worth raising with the people on the other side of the call.

Avoma: Pay for Recorders, Readers Are Free

Strengths. Avoma’s pricing page says “Only pay for meeting recorder users.” View-only users are “Free to watch recordings, view Notes and Transcripts, comment and share.” Startup is $19 per recorder seat per month annually or $29 monthly, with unlimited transcription, unlimited recording storage and playback at up to 3x speed. It records with a bot or bot-free, and lists iPhone, Android, desktop and Chrome apps. Its security page lists SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 42001:2023.

Weaknesses. There is no free plan, only a 14-day trial of the Organization plan, no credit card required. Translation starts at Organization, $29 annually or $39 monthly. Coaching and call scoring (Conversation Intelligence) and forecasting (Revenue Intelligence) are add-ons at $29 per seat per month each, on top of the plan, so a sales team that wants both can more than double the recorder price.

HIPAA, SSO (SAML/OIDC) and data retention policies are Enterprise only, which requires a “Minimum 10 Paid Seats” at $39, billed annually. Its privacy policy says “as long as you use the Service, we will keep information about you.” Its explicit no-training sentence there covers Google Workspace data; a company blog post says customer meeting data is never used to train AI models and that this “can be contractually confirmed in enterprise agreements.” The pricing table says 70+ languages; the home page says 75+.

AmyNote: One Person, One Flat Price

Strengths. AmyNote is an iPhone app that records in-person conversations with no bot and no hardware. One plan has every feature: $12.99 weekly, $19.99 monthly or $99 yearly, advertised as “Unlimited recordings” and “No hidden limits.” It can “Transcribe 140+ languages, translate into 100+,” with translation included. Its security page states “We don’t use your data to train AI models” and “We don’t require an account to use core features.” Saved recordings, transcripts and notes live on the iPhone or iPad.

Weaknesses, stated plainly. On this comparison’s question, AmyNote loses for teams. It has no shared workspace, no viewer seats and no admin console; the seven readers get exported PDF, TXT or Word files, not a live library. It is iOS only and does not join Zoom, Teams or Meet calls. There is no free plan, only a three-day trial.

It holds no SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA or GDPR certification and sells no SSO or SCIM. It publishes no retention period. Local-first is not local-only: transcription and AI features send audio or text to the cloud, where a processing copy may be retained. Transit uses TLS, which AmyNote says it does not call end-to-end encryption.

The Year-One Math

One person, annual billing:

• Read AI Free: $0, five transcripts a month.
• AmyNote: $99.
• Read AI Pro: $180, no playback.
• Avoma Startup: $228, playback included.
• Read AI Enterprise: $270, the cheapest Read AI tier with playback.

The ten-person team, three recorders, annual billing:

• Avoma Startup: $684. Three recorder seats; the seven readers are free.
• Avoma Organization: $1,044, adding translation.
• Read AI Pro, all ten in the Workspace: $1,800. With only the three recorders as members it is $540, and the other seven sit outside the Workspace.
• AmyNote, three subscriptions: $297, with no shared library for anyone.

The compliance floor: Read AI Enterprise+ at five licences is $1,785 a year. Avoma Enterprise at ten seats is $4,680. AmyNote does not sell HIPAA or SSO at any price.

The cheapest team line is AmyNote’s, and it is also the one that buys the least: three separate libraries on three iPhones. The honest team comparison is Avoma Startup at $684 against Read AI Pro at $540 to $1,800, depending on whether the readers need to be inside the Workspace.

Side by Side

How to Check the Seat Rule Before You Buy

• Count recorders and readers separately. List who will run meetings and who will only read the notes. That ratio decides which pricing model wins.
• Ask what a reader costs. Find the line on the pricing page or FAQ that says whether a view-only user needs a licence.
• Price the add-ons you will actually turn on. Coaching, forecasting and translation can sit outside the headline plan.
• Find the compliance minimum. If you need HIPAA or SSO, check the minimum seat count for that tier, not just the per-seat price.

The Bottom Line

The seat rule decides which tool is cheap. Avoma is the most economical for a sales or success team where a few people record and many read, as long as you stay out of the add-ons. Read AI suits teams where everyone records their own calls, and its permanent free plan costs nothing to try.

AmyNote is for the individual whose conversations happen across a table, often in more than one language, who wants the lowest paid solo price and no bot in the room. It is the wrong choice for a team that needs a shared library, Android, call recording or a certificate for procurement. If that trade fits, AmyNote is on the App Store with a three-day trial.

Originally published as an X Article by @AmyNoteApp.