Checked against Granola's own pricing page today: yes, Granola is a subscription. It has three tiers — Basic at $0, Business at $14 per user per month, and Enterprise at $35 per user per month — and none of them is a one-time purchase. The free tier exists, but it comes with limited meeting history, which is the usual shape of a subscription's free plan: enough to try it, not enough to rely on for an archive.
What paying gets you
Business unlocks the features that make Granola a serious tool rather than a demo — advanced integrations with Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity and Zapier, MCP access, an API, shared folders, note templates, and AI chat across meetings, not just within one. Enterprise adds the controls a larger team needs on top of that. None of that changes the billing shape: it's still a recurring charge per person, every month, for as long as the account is active.
What a year of it costs
At $14 per user per month, Business runs $168 a year per person; Enterprise at $35 runs $420. A team of five on Business is $840 a year, and that number resets every year the team keeps using it — there's no point where the software is paid off and the charges stop. That's not a criticism of Granola's pricing on its own terms; it's the standard shape of a cloud product with ongoing infrastructure and a team behind it, and the integrations and team features Business and Enterprise unlock are real capabilities Coii AudioNotes doesn't have an answer for.
What happens if you stop paying
A subscription's other cost shows up at cancellation: access to Business or Enterprise features ends when the billing stops, which is a different proposition from a tool you bought once and keep regardless of whether you're still paying anything. What happens to notes and recordings already stored in the account at that point is worth checking directly with Granola before relying on it, rather than assuming — a cloud archive tied to an active subscription is the vendor's to keep available, not a guarantee.
Where Coii AudioNotes differs
Coii AudioNotes is $19 once, with every feature included and updates covered — no recurring charge, no tier to graduate through, and no meeting-history limit to run into on a free plan because there's no free plan, only a 30-day trial with everything unlocked. Against Granola's Business tier, that's a year and a half of subscription paid for a single person, one time, with nothing further due. Coii AudioNotes against Granola covers the full comparison, integrations and mobile apps included, since the subscription question is only one part of it.
If the subscription is the whole objection
Some people are fine with what Granola costs and just want to stop paying for something recurring. One-time purchase meeting notes apps and AI notetakers without a subscription cover that field beyond just this one comparison, and Granola against Otter is useful if the subscription itself isn't the deciding factor and the choice is between two paid tools instead. Granola alternatives rounds up the wider field either way.