Here's the trap. Both of these say unlimited on the free plan, both cost about eighteen or nineteen dollars a seat paid, and on the face of it choosing between them is a coin flip. Then you hit a wall around summaries that you did not know existed and cannot find documented.
Both meter the same thing, and it is not recording. Capture is genuinely unlimited at both. What is metered at both is the AI comprehension layer: the frameworks, the structured summaries, the assistant. That is the part a sales team is actually buying.
The interesting thing is that each vendor conceals a different half of the same fact. Fathom tells you a limit exists and never how big. Fireflies tells you how big and not that it is granted once, for your whole team, forever.
So this page sets out what is actually unlimited at each, what the meter really is, and which one runs out first for a team your size.
What is genuinely unlimited?
More than you would expect, and this deserves saying before the criticism. Neither of these is a fourteen-day trial pretending to be a free plan.
Fathom's free plan records without limit, and its pricing page says so four separate times: recordings unlimited, transcription unlimited, downloads and clips unlimited, storage unlimited. Fireflies is equally clear in the other direction, its knowledge base opening with a warning that transcription is not charged in AI credits, and that standard transcription, note-taking and recap emails are covered by the plan.
If all you want is a searchable record of what was said, both free plans do that indefinitely and neither is playing games about it.
So what is actually metered?
The comprehension layer. At Fireflies the credits pay for AI Skills, which is the library of a hundred-odd templates including BANT and MEDDIC, plus custom summary sections, Voice Agents and Sales Assist. At Fathom the rows marked "Limited use" are advanced summaries, Ask Fathom within a call, account-wide Ask Fathom, and the Zapier and Make integrations.
In both cases the metered thing is the qualification framework. A chronological recap of a discovery call is a transcript with paragraph breaks, and turning it into a MEDDPICC summary is the product. That is what draws down the allowance at both vendors.
How big is the Fireflies allowance really?
Every Fireflies plan card, the free one included, advertises "Unlimited AI summaries". Two lines below on the same card sits "20 AI credits". Both statements are true and they are about different things.
What the pricing page does not say, and the knowledge base does, is that those credits are a one-time grant rather than a monthly allowance, and that they are shared across the whole account rather than counted per seat. Grants are 20 on Free, 20 on Pro, 30 on Business and 50 on Enterprise.
| Plan | Credits, once | Per seat at 5 | At 20 | At 50 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 20 | 4.00 | 1.00 | 0.40 |
| Pro | 20 | 4.00 | 1.00 | 0.40 |
| Business | 30 | 6.00 | 1.50 | 0.60 |
| Enterprise | 50 | 10.00 | 2.50 | 1.00 |
A fifty-person Business team shares thirty credits, once, for the life of the account. Six tenths of a credit per person. Consumption is per query and dynamic, so you cannot forecast the spend either, and running out auto-subscribes a paid account to $5 a month.
How big is the Fathom allowance?
Nobody outside Fathom knows. Four rows on the pricing page are marked "Limited use" and no number appears against them, there or in the help centre article that discusses them. The allowance is real, it is documented as existing, and its size is discovered by exhausting it.
What do they cost, and what happens if you leave?
Fathom is $19 a seat monthly, $15 on annual billing, with a two-seat minimum, so the cheapest team invoice is $38. Individual Premium is $20 monthly. Fireflies is $18 a seat.
Exit is where they separate. Cancelling Fathom does not return your recordings: its help centre says team recordings stay unreachable until the account is reactivated, and scheduled deletion is Enterprise-only and not self-serve. If your recordings are a record of customer commitments, that is worth knowing at signup rather than at renewal.
So which should you pick?
- If you want a searchable record and nothing more, either free plan, indefinitely. Both are genuinely unlimited on capture and neither expires. This is a real option and most comparisons skip past it.
- If you want framework summaries at any volume, budget for them separately at both. Neither tool's headline price includes the thing you are buying it for, and at Fireflies the included grant is exhausted by a single person in a week.
- For a team above about ten people, treat Fireflies' credits as a sample rather than an allowance. Thirty credits shared fifty ways is not a plan, it is a demonstration.
- Before choosing Fathom, get the limit in writing. It is the one number that decides whether the product does what you want, and it is the one number not published anywhere.
- Ask both what happens to your recordings on cancellation, because the answers differ and only one of them is documented as leaving your data unreachable.
The answer to the question in the title is that unlimited covers recording, transcription and storage at both, and covers none of the AI work at either. The two companies have made the same product decision and disclosed opposite halves of it, which is why the comparison feels like a coin flip until you go looking for the meter.