Sembly Alternative — Local Windows Meeting Notes, Flat $5/mo

Yes. VocalFuse is a Windows 10/11 desktop app: it records your microphone and system audio beside Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet and transcribes on your own PC. Sembly's agent joins the call and every recording uploads to its cloud — SOC 2 Type II with model-training opt-out, but cloud-only on every plan, with no self-host option. With VocalFuse the audio never leaves your machine, and transcripts are local files you keep and correct.

No. Sembly retired its free Personal plan on March 1, 2026 and moved those users to a capped Basic trial. The current free offer is a 7-day trial (the length is published only in Sembly's help-center article, not on the pricing page) with 1 meeting hour per user and 750 one-time bonus credits — enough to test the slide-deck generator, not to run a month of meetings. VocalFuse has no trial clock: $5/mo Basic from day one, cancel anytime.

Per sembly.ai/pricing (September 2026): Basic is $17/mo monthly or $10/mo billed annually for exactly 1 user; Pro is $29/user/mo monthly ($20 annual) for up to 40 users; MAX is $39/user/mo monthly ($30 annual) with a minimum of 3 seats — Sembly auto-creates three seats at signup and bills all three after the trial, so the cheapest real MAX invoice is about $90/mo ($1,080/year). Enterprise starts at 10 users and is quote-only. VocalFuse is $5/mo flat per account with no seat ladder.

Credits meter the AI work Sembly does for you — notes, summaries, chat, and artifact generation. Every user gets 2,500 credits on Basic, 3,000 on Pro, 3,500 on MAX per month, plus a one-time 2,500-credit workspace bonus. Unused credits expire at month end on Basic and Pro (per Sembly's own pricing FAQ), so a heavy AI month runs the allowance dry rather than banking it. VocalFuse has no credit economy: transcription and notes run locally on your own machine and are unmetered.

Two compounding rules: MAX requires a minimum of 3 users, and Sembly automatically creates those three seats at signup, billing them all once the 7-day trial ends. At $39/user monthly that is $117/mo ($1,404/year); on annual billing it is $90/mo ($1,080/year). If you need MAX features — HIPAA, custom SSO, audit log, HD video, unlimited history — budget for the floor, not the headline per-user price.

Reasonable, not exceptional: a 2026 independent 47-meeting benchmark put Sembly's average accuracy at 84.7% (72% worst case), behind Read AI's 87.3% in the same test. Sembly itself positions around deliverable production — Semblian 2.0/3.0 turns meeting context into branded proposals, decks, and reports — so transcription accuracy is not its headline. VocalFuse runs a Whisper-class local engine, and because the model runs on your PC you can re-transcribe or swap models as open engines improve.

Otter Pro is the cheapest paid seat at $16.99/mo ($8.33 annual) with 1,200 minutes; Sembly Pro runs $20/user annual ($29 monthly) with unlimited capture and credits; Fireflies Pro is about $10/user annual with 8,000-minute storage caps. All three bill per user and run in the cloud. VocalFuse stays flat at $5/mo per account with no seat arithmetic — a 5-person team pays $25/mo total, versus $50–$145/mo on the per-seat ladders.

HIPAA compliance is available only on Sembly MAX and Enterprise — and MAX carries the automatic 3-seat floor, so real HIPAA entry is about $1,404/user/year at monthly billing or $1,080/user/year committed. Sembly holds SOC 2 Type II and GDPR alignment on all plans, with model-training opt-out. VocalFuse sidesteps the question: local processing means no BAA is needed for the transcription itself because audio never reaches a vendor cloud.