tl;dv

A German meeting recorder that documents unlimited free recording and transcription, then rations the AI notes - the inverse of how its rivals shape a free plan.

Verdict

This is a documentation review, not a walkthrough: no account was opened for this page and no screenshots were captured, so nothing here is a first-hand claim about what the interface looks like today. A further caveat specific to this page: the vendor's pricing page returned a not-found error on October 7, 2026 to every fetch attempted for this review, so the figures below come from the vendor's own blog posts published in July and August 2026 and from its privacy policy, and they should be treated as slightly less firm than a pricing page would be. On the documented design, tl;dv inverts the usual free-plan shape. Recording and transcription in more than 30 languages are described as unlimited on the free plan; what is rationed is the AI layer - ten meetings with AI notes a month, ten Ask tl;dv queries, five uploads - and free recordings are retained for three months. That makes it the right free plan for people who want the archive and only occasionally want the summary, and the wrong one for anyone who wants AI notes on every call or an archive that lasts.

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Read this first: what kind of page this is

This page is a documentation review. No free account was opened, no recorder was sent into a meeting, and no screenshots were captured. Nothing below is a first-hand account of what the app looks like or how well it transcribes your audio.

It also carries a second, sharper caveat. On October 7, 2026, the vendor's pricing page at tldv.io/pricing returned a page-not-found error to every fetch attempted for this review, with and without a trailing slash, through two different methods. The product's features page and privacy policy loaded normally. So the plan figures on this page come from the vendor's own blog - specifically its pricing explainers and comparison posts dated July 6, July 27 and August 11, 2026 - rather than from the pricing page itself. Those are official vendor pages, written by the vendor about its own plans, but they are marketing posts and they do not all agree with each other. Where they disagree, this page says so.

The free-plan limits are consistent across all three posts and the privacy policy. The paid prices are consistent for Pro and inconsistent for Business. Read the live pricing page before acting on any number here.

What the free tier actually includes

Across the vendor's July and August 2026 posts, the free plan - which the vendor calls Free Forever and describes as needing no card - is shaped as follows.

Recording and transcription are unlimited. The features page states that the free plan includes unlimited transcriptions and video recordings, that the product records, transcribes and summarises across Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, and that it supports more than 30 languages. Bot recordings are described as capturing video, audio and a transcript that shows who said what.

The AI layer is what is capped. The August 2026 explainer lists ten meetings with AI notes per month, ten Ask tl;dv queries, and five uploads. The July 6 post phrases the same limits as ten AI meeting notes a month, ten Ask tl;dv AI credits, ten multi-meeting AI reports and five video uploads. So: every meeting gets recorded and transcribed, but only ten a month get the AI-written notes, and you get ten questions to the assistant.

Retention is the other limit, and it is documented in two places. The August 2026 post says data retention on the free plan runs up to three months and warns that it is not somewhere to build an archive you expect to find next year. The privacy policy states that free users' meeting recordings are retained for three months while paying users' recordings are kept until account deletion. One July post says free recordings archive after three days, which this page reads as an error given the policy says months; check the live page.

What this adds up to is a free plan whose generosity is in the raw material and whose scarcity is in the finished product. If you mostly want to be able to go back and find what someone said, the free plan is substantial. If you want a neat summary in your inbox after every call, you will exhaust it in the first fortnight.

What sits behind the paywall

Pro is the consistent figure: $18 per seat per month billed annually, or $29 billed monthly, in both the July 27 and August 11, 2026 posts. The Business tier is not consistent. Two posts put it at $29 per seat per month annually or $39 monthly; a third post from the same summer quotes $59 per user per month. This page will not pick one. Enterprise is custom-priced across all sources. Until the pricing page is reachable again, treat Pro as reasonably firm and Business as unverified.

What Pro changes, per the August 2026 explainer, is the AI cap and the retention: it removes the limits on AI notes, adds custom note templates, action-item assignment, follow-up email drafting, global transcript search, unlimited uploads and storage, access to more than 5,000 integrations through Zapier, and developer access through an MCP server, an API and webhooks. Business, per the same sources, adds multi-meeting AI insights, scheduled AI reports, playbook monitoring and objection handling, and one post emphasises that there are no usage-based AI fees on it.

The structural reading is unusual and worth stating. Most meeting tools give you a limited amount of everything on the free plan and sell more of it. This one gives you an unlimited amount of the expensive-to-store thing - video - and sells the AI output and the permanence. That is a confident shape, and it means the upgrade is not about volume of meetings but about whether you want notes on all of them and whether you want them to still exist in a year. For a solo user with a few important meetings a month, the free plan may be enough indefinitely; for a team that treats the archive as a record, Pro is the real entry point.

Who it is for, and who should skip it

The free plan fits someone who records a lot and summarises a little. A consultant who wants every client call on file in case a detail is disputed, a researcher doing interviews who will write their own notes, a founder who wants the recording but reads the transcript rather than a summary - for these people, unlimited recording and transcription with ten AI summaries a month is a working allowance, and the three-month retention is a filing discipline rather than a dealbreaker.

It also fits European buyers for whom the vendor's jurisdiction matters. The privacy policy identifies the operator as tldx Solutions GmbH, a German company, and frames its obligations in terms of the EU regulation. That is not by itself a guarantee of anything, but it is a different starting point from a US consumer tool.

Who should skip it: anyone who wants AI notes on every meeting. Ten a month is roughly two a week, and a sales or support team will consume that in days. Anyone who needs the recordings to persist - a compliance archive, a training library, a record of client commitments - should treat the three-month window as disqualifying for the free plan and budget for Pro from the start. And anyone with a backlog of existing recordings will find five uploads is a taste, not a tool.

If what you want is a simple monthly minute budget with summaries on everything inside it, the Otter review on this site documents that shape, with a 30-minute cap per meeting as its own catch. If you want the bot and the summary free but can live with a storage cap and no export, the Fireflies review covers that.

Limits and what users report

The documented limits are above. What follows is how they play out, and what public discussion adds.

The ten-notes cap is the one people meet first, and the one most often misunderstood. Because recording is unlimited, new users reasonably assume the whole product is, and then find the eleventh meeting of the month has a transcript but no summary. That is the documented behaviour. The sensible approach is to decide in advance which meetings earn an AI note - client calls, not internal syncs - and to read transcripts for the rest, which is not a hardship for someone who reads faster than they listen.

The retention window is the limit people meet last and resent most. Three months is long enough to forget it exists and short enough to lose something you needed. Users on public forums describe discovering it when looking for a recording from a previous quarter. The vendor's own August 2026 post warns about it explicitly, which is to its credit; the advice is to export anything that matters before it expires, remembering that uploads and downloads are themselves limited on the free plan.

The recorder-in-the-room issue is the same as everywhere in this category. The privacy policy states the vendor collects consent from non-client participants before the meeting, which suggests a notification mechanism exists; this page cannot describe how it appears to participants today. Say that you are recording, regardless.

Transcript quality across 30-plus languages cannot be graded from documentation. The sub-scores reflect the shape: ease is high because starting is free and recording is automatic; features and value are above the middle because the free material is unlimited and the AI rationing is honest; support is the lowest score because the documentation is thinner than the larger rivals' and the pricing page itself was unreachable when this review was written.

Privacy and data use

The privacy policy (read October 7, 2026) is more specific than most on the question buyers care about. It states that tldx Solutions GmbH does not use customer content to train, fine-tune or improve foundation models. It states that the company will not sell collected data to other companies, and that staff do not access recordings unless a user grants the support team access for technical help.

On retention, it distinguishes tiers plainly: free users' meeting recordings are kept for three months; paying users' recordings are kept until the account is deleted. On deletion, it describes a right to erasure exercised through the company's data protection officer. On infrastructure, it names its hosting providers as certified to ISO 27001, PCI DSS and SOC 1 and 2, and states all connections use TLS. On jurisdiction, it frames compliance in terms of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which follows from the operator being a German company.

On consent, the policy states that the vendor collects consent from non-client meeting participants before the meeting. That is more than most vendors in this category say, but it does not transfer the legal obligation. Whether a recording is lawful depends on where every participant is sitting, and a mechanism that notifies them is not the same as a mechanism that makes the recording your business alone. The practice that works everywhere is a spoken notice at the start.

For regulated work, the same rule applies as on every page on this site: a free consumer account is the wrong instrument, and the Business or Enterprise paper plus a decision from whoever owns the risk is the right one. A good privacy policy is a reason to shortlist a vendor, not a substitute for that decision.

Alternatives worth a look

The two direct rivals reviewed on this site shape their free plans the opposite way, which makes the comparison clean.

Otter.ai documents a free plan of 300 transcription minutes a month with a summary on every conversation, a 30-minute cap per conversation, and three lifetime file imports. It is the mirror image: limited recording, unlimited summaries within the budget. Its privacy policy states that de-identified recordings and transcripts train its own models, which is the opposite of the commitment described above.

Fireflies documents a free plan with the bot, live transcription in over 100 languages, summaries drawn from a credit balance, a 400-minute storage cap, no video recording and no transcript downloads until Pro. Its privacy policy, like this vendor's, states that personal information is not used for model training. Between the two, the question is whether you would rather have unlimited video that expires in three months or limited storage that does not.

For the stage after the meeting, NotebookLM accepts transcripts as sources and answers with citations. And if your organisation already pays for Zoom, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 at a tier with a native AI summary, check what you already have before adding a bot.

Frequently asked

Is recording really unlimited on the free plan? Per the vendor's features page and its August 2026 pricing post, yes - unlimited video recordings and unlimited transcription across more than 30 languages.

So what is limited? AI notes on ten meetings a month, ten Ask tl;dv queries and five uploads, per the vendor's July and August 2026 posts. And free recordings are retained for three months, per the privacy policy.

What does Pro cost? $18 per seat per month billed annually or $29 monthly, per two vendor posts from summer 2026. The pricing page itself could not be retrieved on October 7, 2026; check it.

What does Business cost? The vendor's own posts disagree - $29 annually and $39 monthly in two of them, $59 in a third. This page does not know. Check the live page.

Does it work with Zoom, Google Meet and Teams? The features page lists all three.

Is my meeting content used to train AI? The privacy policy states that customer content is not used to train, fine-tune or improve foundation models.

Where is the company based? The privacy policy names tldx Solutions GmbH, a German company, and frames compliance under the EU GDPR.

Why no screenshots? No account was opened for this page. That is what a documentation review means on this site.

Does this page earn a commission? No. There is no affiliate relationship with this vendor; the link goes to the official site.

Bottom line

tl;dv's free plan is generous where its rivals are stingy and stingy where they are generous. Unlimited recording and transcription, across the three major meeting platforms and more than 30 languages, is a real allowance - the kind that lets a solo professional keep every call on file for nothing. The rationing is on the AI notes, ten a month, and on time, with free recordings expiring after three months. If you read transcripts and only occasionally want a summary, the free plan may be all you ever need. If you want the summary on every call, or you want the archive to last, Pro at $18 a month on an annual plan - as the vendor's summer 2026 posts have it - is where the product begins.

The privacy policy earns a specific mention: a plain statement that customer content does not train foundation models, a German operator under GDPR, and tier-specific retention terms stated in writing. For European small businesses that is a shortlist reason.

What this page cannot tell you, and must say so because the site's method requires it: what the current pricing page says, since it could not be retrieved on October 7, 2026; which of the vendor's conflicting Business prices is correct; how good the transcripts are on your audio; or what the app looks like today. No account was opened and no screenshots were captured. The vendor's pricing page is the record. When it is reachable, read it before this page.

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We have no affiliate relationship with this vendor. Link goes to the official site.