Kuulo vs tl;dv: notes that last longer than your subscription

tl;dv offers one of the most genuinely feature-rich free plans in the AI notetaker market. Unlimited recordings, unlimited transcription, AI meeting summaries, 30-language support, and timestamped highlight clips — all free, all available without a credit card. For teams evaluating options, the free tier appears to offer everything you'd need.

Two things in the small print change this picture considerably.

What tl;dv does well

Unlimited recording on free. Like Fathom, tl;dv removed the per-minute cap that constrains competitors. Unlimited meetings, unlimited transcription, no artificial throttle.

30 languages. More than Otter's three. For international teams working across language barriers on video calls, this is a meaningful advantage.

Timestamped highlights and video clips. tl;dv's clip feature is one of the strongest in the category — you can extract a specific 90-second moment from a 90-minute meeting and share it. For sales teams reviewing objection handling, product teams capturing customer feedback, or executives reviewing board calls, this is genuinely useful functionality.

Meeting templates. Pre-structured formats for sales calls, product discovery, customer success, and HR interviews. The template system is well-designed and produces cleaner output than generic AI summaries.

Integrations. Slack, Notion, Salesforce, and dozens of others — tl;dv's integration depth is comparable to Fireflies.

For teams whose work happens on Zoom and Teams, with stable internet, no sensitivity requirements, and a need for video clip extraction: tl;dv is a strong product.

The two free plan constraints that matter

Constraint 1: recordings auto-delete after 3 months

On tl;dv's free plan, your recordings are automatically deleted 3 months after the meeting date. Not archived. Not moved to a cold storage tier. Deleted.

This is a retention policy that is easy to miss when evaluating the product. You record your first meeting in January. The transcript and summary are available. You use tl;dv happily through February, March, and April. In April, you need to go back to the January meeting to verify what was decided about a specific deliverable. The recording is gone.

For occasional reference — a one-off product decision, a meeting you'll probably never revisit — this doesn't matter. For users who need their meeting archive to persist — legal teams, clinical supervision records, ongoing client relationships, research documentation — 3-month auto-deletion is a structural problem.

Constraint 2: 10 AI-powered summaries total on the free plan — ever

This is the less-publicized limit, and it's the more disruptive one.

tl;dv's free plan includes 10 AI-powered summary generations in total across the entire lifetime of your account — not 10 per month. Once you've generated 10 AI summaries, you have no more AI summaries on free. To continue getting AI output, you upgrade to Pro at $18/user/month.

For a user attending 5 meetings per week who wants AI summaries on each one, 10 credits lasts exactly two weeks. The free plan is effectively a two-week trial of the AI features before you hit a permanent paywall.

This limit is buried in the plan comparison table rather than featured in the marketing. Users typically discover it when they run out.

tl;dv's other structural constraints

Video call only. tl;dv joins meetings as a bot on Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. In-person meetings, lectures, ward rounds, field interviews: not captured.

Cloud-only. All audio transmitted to tl;dv's servers. No offline capability.

Visible bot. "tl;dv is recording" alert for all participants. Same sensitivity limitations as Fireflies and Fathom.

Pro plan pricing. $18/user/month for unlimited AI summaries and recording retention. Business at $59/user/month for multi-workspace features. The jump from free to Pro is steep relative to the feature addition.

Notes that don't disappear

The philosophical contrast with Kuulo is worth stating directly.

tl;dv: you generate notes, they live in tl;dv's cloud, they're deleted at 3 months on free.

Kuulo: notes are generated on your device, stored on your device, accessible on your device indefinitely, deleted only when you delete them.

The meeting you recorded in October is on your iPhone in January. The clinical encounter you documented in Year 3 of medical school is still there in FY1. The interview you recorded in the field in Month 1 of your PhD is available when you're writing the methods chapter in Year 3. Notes built on your device persist for as long as you choose to keep them, independent of any company's subscription model or data retention policy.

This is not a minor distinction for users who build institutional knowledge from their recordings. It is the difference between a tool that gives you notes for now and a tool that gives you a persistent record.

The comparison

When tl;dv is the right choice

tl;dv is well-suited for teams on Zoom who want video clip extraction, timestamped highlights, and integrations with sales or product tools. If the ability to cut and share a specific 90-second moment from a recorded call is a workflow requirement, tl;dv does this better than Kuulo.

Be aware of the 3-month deletion and 10-summary lifetime cap on free before committing to it as a long-term workflow tool.

When Kuulo is the right choice

Kuulo is the right choice when notes need to persist — when you're building a record over months and years, not a transient summary of this week's calls. When recordings happen outside video call platforms. When audio cannot reach a cloud server. When AI features shouldn't run out after two weeks.

The simplest summary: if you need video clips from Zoom calls and the 3-month retention works for your use case, tl;dv is excellent. If you need your notes to last longer than your next subscription renewal, Kuulo is the architecture that makes that possible.

When the bot misses the meeting

tl;dv works by joining your video call as a bot participant. This introduces the same bot-admission failure mode shared by all bot-based recorders: if the bot is denied entry to the waiting room, if the host declines the recording participant, or if the meeting platform restricts third-party bots, the recording doesn't start.

The failure is silent from the user's perspective. tl;dv has no way to alert you mid-meeting that its bot was denied admission — because the bot isn't there to send an alert. The first indication is the absence of a summary after the call.

This failure mode is particularly consequential given tl;dv's free plan structure. If a meeting isn't captured, the attempt may have consumed one of the 10 lifetime AI summaries without producing anything. And because free recordings are deleted after 3 months, a failed capture that goes undetected could be assumed to have succeeded until the window for recovery has closed.

For US, EU, or global teams where meeting records carry compliance, legal, or clinical weight — in any jurisdiction — the silent failure is a governance risk on top of the inconvenience. The meeting that should have been captured wasn't, and there is no record that the capture was even attempted.

Kuulo has no bot, no admission process, and no platform dependency. It records from the device microphone regardless of what meeting software is running, what the host has permitted, or what the network is doing. The recording is confirmed on-device in real time, not discovered to be missing after the fact.