Fireflies Fred Is Live: The Notetaker That Became an AI Teammate

Fireflies has spent years as the bot that joins your calls and writes the notes. On November 11, 2026, the company gave that bot a promotion. Fred, the assistant that used to stop at transcripts and summaries, is now an AI teammate that also works your email, your Slack channels, your calendar and your phone calls, with a hardware device called Fly on the way.

The pitch is simple: one subscription instead of a stack of single-purpose tools. The bill is less simple. The seat price starts at $10 a month on annual billing, but the features that make Fred a teammate run on a separate credit system, and the free plan comes with a three-meeting limit that only disappears if you let the bot auto-join your calendar. This review works through what Fred does now, what each plan actually buys, and where the catches sit. We have not run Fred ourselves; this is a research review based on the official announcement, the live pricing page and Fireflies' own help guides, all checked on November 14, 2026.

What Fred is now

The launch, announced in a GlobeNewswire release on November 11, is the biggest product expansion Fireflies has attempted. Meeting notes are still the core: Fred takes notes across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, either through the meeting bot or, through the Fireflies desktop app, without one. Live Assist adds real-time answers, coaching and translation during calls, and summaries can be customised for sales calls, interviews and team meetings.

Everything beyond notes is new or newly bundled. Daily Briefs pull from calendars, past meetings, emails and messages to start the day, and Meeting Prep researches attendees and companies before calls. Fireflies Scheduler is a free scheduling tool with shareable booking links that Fred can manage from Fireflies or Slack. Fireflies Talk offers free, unlimited voice typing in any app, with a Command Mode that lets you ask Fred out loud to summarise content, find information or complete tasks. Fireflies Clips is a free screen recorder in the Chrome extension that turns recordings into shareable videos with transcripts and notes, and can build step-by-step guides and SOPs from them.

The two pieces that change what Fred is are the Email and Slack Assistants and FredBots. The email assistant organises inboxes, drafts replies and follow-ups for review, and handles routine email tasks under customisable rules. In Slack, Fred summarises channels and long threads, flags updates you missed, and answers when a team tags @Fred to research, create reports or complete tasks. FredBots take on ongoing responsibilities, such as monitoring competitors, preparing customer feedback reports and following up with customers, using hundreds of AI Skills that can research the web, operate a computer and work across connected apps. Voice Agents take calls on behalf of teams, running candidate screenings, sales discovery, customer support calls and user interviews, with summaries and scorecards for the team to review.

Underneath it all is Knowledge Search in AskFred: teams can ask about anything discussed in meetings, documents, emails, Slack and connected apps, and get answers with links back to the original sources. Fireflies now connects to more than 240 tools, up from more than 100 integrations, including more than 100 MCP connectors, so Fred can update CRM records and manage project tasks without anyone moving information between systems by hand.

Fireflies Fly is the one piece you cannot buy yet. It is a compact hardware device that attaches to the back of a phone and takes notes for phone calls, WhatsApp calls and in-person conversations. Availability is expected early next year, with a waitlist open now, and no price has been published. The announcement itself carries a sensible warning: users should make sure everyone knows when they are recording and follow local recording rules.

Fireflies says the expansion follows how customers were already using Fred. The company reports that use of Fred for work beyond meeting notes grew 140% in six months, with nearly 100 million tasks completed in that period, email assistant usage up 25 times in a single quarter, and Voice Agents used by thousands of companies across more than 50 countries. It also says more than 20 million people across 1 million organisations use Fireflies, including teams at 75% of the Fortune 500. All of those figures are company-reported, with no independent check available, so treat them as the company's account of its own growth rather than verified facts.

What it costs

Fireflies lists four plans on its pricing page, all priced per seat per month in US dollars. The annual discount is steepest on Pro, where the monthly price drops from $18 to $10, a saving of about 44% that matches the "save up to 44%" line on the page.

At November 14, 2026 market rates of 1 USD = 0.7569 GBP and 1.4267 CAD, Pro on annual billing is about £7.57 or CA$14.27 per seat a month, Business is about £14.38 or CA$27.11, and Enterprise is about £29.52 or CA$55.64. Those conversions are approximations; Fireflies bills in US dollars.

A five-person team on Pro pays $50 a month on annual billing, or $600 a year, which works out to about £454 or CA$856. The same five seats on monthly billing cost $90 a month, or $1,080 a year, about £817 or CA$1,541, so the annual commitment saves $480 a year for a team that size. Business for five seats is $95 a month on annual billing, or $1,140 a year, about £863 or CA$1,626.

What the seat price buys depends on the tier. Pro adds the Email Assistant, AI Skills, Voice Agents, a Personal Assistant bundle, video recording and downloads, unlimited integrations and 8,000 minutes of storage per seat on top of everything in Free. Business adds multi-language mode, conversation intelligence, team analytics and unlimited storage. Enterprise adds a rules engine, SSO and SCIM, audit logs, HIPAA readiness with a business associate agreement, private storage, custom data retention and a dedicated account manager. API access is listed on every plan including Free, with rate limits of 30 requests a minute and 500 a day on Free, rising to 60 a minute and 5,000 a day on Pro.

The credit system is the real bill

The seat price is only half the story. Fireflies runs a second currency, AI credits, and the features that make Fred a teammate spend them. AskFred queries, AI Skills, Voice Agents, Sales Assist, soundbites, custom summary sections and the Email and Slack Assistants all draw on the credit pool. Standard transcription, note-taking and recap emails do not; Fireflies' own AI credits guide states that plainly.

Every account gets a one-time pool of credits at sign-up: 20 on Free, 20 on Pro, 30 on Business and 50 on Enterprise. The pool is shared across the whole team and does not grow when you add seats, so a five-seat Pro team holds 20 credits in total, not 100. Upgrading replaces the pool rather than adding to it: moving from Free to Business leaves you with 30 credits, not 50. The included credits do not expire, but they are a sample, not an allowance. Credits are charged per query, with the cost depending on the complexity of the request, and Fireflies publishes no per-feature credit price list, so you cannot budget a month of AskFred questions precisely in advance.

When the pool runs out, extra credits are a paid add-on available only on paid plans:

That works out to $0.10 per credit on the smallest monthly pack and $0.048 per credit on the largest annual pack. Purchased credits auto-renew on the chosen billing interval and unused credits do not carry over to the next cycle, whatever the billing interval. Two small sweeteners exist: creating your first Voice Agent adds a one-time bonus of 100 credits, valid for 14 days, and a seven-day AI credits trial opens all AI features before you commit to a paid subscription.

The part that can move a bill without anyone adding a seat is auto-upgrade. If a paid plan runs out of credits and has no credit subscription, Fireflies automatically subscribes it to the lowest tier, $5 a month for 50 credits, and shows a banner at the bottom of the dashboard. An existing credit subscriber is moved up to the next tier instead. Free users are not auto-charged; they see a paywall and are prompted to upgrade. Auto-upgrade can be switched off in billing settings, and it should be, unless you want the credit meter to decide your spend for you.

One more quiet drain is switched on by default. The Personal Assistant bundle includes Daily Digest and Meeting Prep, both enabled by default, and both consume AI credits on a schedule. Tasks, the third part of the bundle, is always on and free. If you do not want the daily brief eating your 20-credit pool, turn Daily Digest and Meeting Prep off in the AI Skills settings before your first week is over.

The free plan, honestly

Fireflies' pricing page lists "unlimited transcription" on the Free plan with an asterisk, and the asterisk does real work. Fireflies' own transcription credits guide says accounts created on or after September 1, 2026 get a small number of transcription credits at sign-up: 3 if you sign up on the web, 5 through the Chrome extension, and 10 as a new mobile user. Each meeting transcription and summary uses one credit, so a web sign-up gets three transcribed meetings. Accounts created before September 1, 2026 that already had unlimited free meetings keep their earlier limits.

There is a way to remove the cap. Turn on the Auto-join calendar meetings toggle and transcription credits are only used for summarising meetings, not for transcribing them, which makes transcription unlimited with no cap on the number of meetings. The trade is the bot itself: Auto-join sends Fred to the meetings on your calendar, and by default that means every calendar meeting with a video link. You can scope it to meetings you own, which keeps the bot out of calls other people host. Check that setting before a busy week, not after Fred has already introduced itself to a client.

The rest of the free plan is thin in the usual places. Storage stops at 400 minutes for the whole team, which is roughly six one-hour meetings, and it is a total, not a monthly allowance. AI summaries are limited, each recording stops at two hours, there is no video recording and no downloads. That makes Free a fair place to test whether Fred's transcripts are good enough for your calls, and a poor place to archive a quarter of meetings.

One consent point matters more now that Fred does more than take notes. Fred joins calls as a visible participant, and Fireflies' own announcement says users should make sure everyone knows when they are recording and follow local recording rules. The risk is not theoretical: in our comparison of the 7 best AI meeting note-takers in 2026, we found Microsoft Teams admins can now flag third-party meeting bots as unverified and block bot recorders outright, so confirm your company's policy before Fred starts joining client calls.

What is not ready yet

The November 11 launch is a staged rollout, not a single-day switch. The release says the new experience is live, with many of the expanded capabilities rolling out progressively over the following weeks. FredBots began becoming available on launch day, while Fireflies Scheduler and Fireflies Clips start rolling out over the next couple of weeks. Waitlists are open for FredBots, Scheduler, Clips and Fly. If you sign up today for Scheduler, Clips or Fly, you are joining a queue, and Fly has no published price at all.

That matters for the buying decision. The Fred you can use on day one is the notetaker plus the email and Slack assistants, Voice Agents and knowledge search. The full picture, with FredBots handling ongoing responsibilities and Clips turning screen recordings into SOPs, arrives over the coming weeks on a schedule Fireflies has not published in detail. Early adopters should expect features to appear gradually rather than all at once.

Fred vs the other AI teammates

Fred is not the only AI teammate to launch this month. ElevenLabs opened ElevenAI, a free AI teammate for meetings, on November 11, the same day as Fred, and xAI put Grok Bot 1.0, a $30-per-seat teammate for Slack and Teams, into the same week. The older notetakers are still the price reference point: Fathom's Premium plan is $16 a user a month on annual billing and Otter's Pro plan is $8.33 a user a month on annual billing, both as priced in our October 2026 comparison, so confirm current prices before you pay.

Fred is the only one of the five that bundles email, Slack, voice agents and scheduling under one seat price, and at $10 a seat a month on annual billing it undercuts Grok Bot 1.0 by two thirds before credits enter the picture. ElevenAI is the cheapest entry point, free for now with no published price, but it is meetings-focused where Fred reaches across the rest of the working day. Fathom and Otter are the better pure notetakers on price and free tiers, and neither claims to be a teammate. The honest comparison is that Fred asks you to pay for breadth, and then charges again, in credits, for the intelligence that makes the breadth useful.

Five things to check before you switch on Fred

• Audit Auto-join first. The bot joins every calendar meeting with a video link by default. Scope it to meetings you own, or invite [email protected] by hand, before your first busy week.
• Turn off Daily Digest and Meeting Prep if you do not want them. Both are on by default and both spend AI credits on a schedule. Your 20-credit pool can drain before you ask Fred a single question.
• Pause credit auto-upgrade. In Settings, then Billing, you can switch off the automatic move to the $5-a-month credit tier. Without that, a paid plan that runs dry subscribes itself.
• Count the free plan properly. Three transcribed meetings, 400 minutes of team storage and limited summaries is a trial, not a free archive. Plan the upgrade before the storage wall, not after it deletes older recordings.
• Check recording rules before client calls. Tell participants Fred is recording, and confirm your company's policy on meeting bots, especially on Microsoft Teams, where admins can block them.

Frequently asked questions

Is Fireflies Fred free?

There is a free plan at $0, but it is narrow. New web sign-ups get three transcribed meetings, with Auto-join removing the cap, plus 400 minutes of team storage, limited AI summaries and 20 one-time AI credits. The teammate features, email and Slack assistants, Voice Agents and FredBots, are on paid plans and spend AI credits.

How much does Fireflies Fred cost?

Pro is $10 per seat a month on annual billing, or $18 billed monthly. Business is $19 a seat a month on annual billing, or $29 monthly. Enterprise is $39 a seat a month, annual billing only. AI credit packs cost extra, from $5 a month for 50 credits to $600 a month for 10,000, with annual billing 20% lower.

What do AI credits cost and what uses them?

Every account gets a one-time pool: 20 credits on Free and Pro, 30 on Business and 50 on Enterprise, shared across the team. AskFred, AI Skills, Voice Agents, Sales Assist and the email and Slack assistants spend credits, charged per query by complexity. Transcription itself does not use credits. Top-ups start at $5 a month for 50 credits, and unused purchased credits do not roll over.

Is Fred available now?

Fred launched on November 11, 2026. The meeting notes, email and Slack assistants, Voice Agents and knowledge search are live, with FredBots becoming available from launch day. Fireflies Scheduler and Fireflies Clips roll out over the next couple of weeks, and the Fly hardware device is expected early next year. Waitlists are open for all four.

Does Fred work without a bot joining the call?

Yes. The Fireflies desktop app records without the bot, and the Chrome extension can record without it too. The bot is the default route, though, and Auto-join sends it to your calendar meetings unless you change the setting.

Does Fireflies use my meeting data to train AI?

According to the company, no. Fireflies says it does not use user content to train generative AI models, its vendors are contractually prohibited from doing so, customers own their data and can delete it, and Enterprise customers can use private storage to keep supported data in their own cloud storage buckets.

Fred is the most complete version of the AI-teammate idea to ship this month: one subscription that covers meetings, email, Slack, scheduling and voice calls, from a company whose notetaker already sits in millions of calendars. The seat price is fair for that breadth. The credit meter is the part to watch, because it decides what the teammate actually costs once the included pool is gone. Try the free plan with Auto-join scoped to meetings you own, check the credit balance before you switch on the daily digest, and pause auto-upgrade until you know how fast your team spends credits. If you want the notetaker comparison first, our roundup of the 7 best AI meeting note-takers in 2026 shows how Fred's roots stack up against Fathom, Otter and the rest.