Which export you get depends on your plan, not just your data

Two people leaving Fireflies can have completely different experiences getting their own meetings out, and the difference is not how much history they have — it is which plan they were on when they decided to leave. That single fact changes the order this move should happen in, so it comes before anything about Coii AudioNotes.

The plan gate, stated plainly

Fireflies' own knowledge base article on downloading transcripts, summaries and recordings says downloads are available on Pro plans and higher. Free-plan accounts do not get the download icon on an individual meeting at all. If you have been on Free the whole time, the per-meeting route described below simply is not available to you, and the account-wide export in the next section is the one path that is.

If you are on Pro, Business or Enterprise, per-meeting download is straightforward: open a meeting, click the download icon at the bottom centre, and choose a format. Transcripts come as PDF, DOCX, SRT, CSV, JSON or MD, with timestamps and speaker labels as optional settings. Summaries come as DOCX, PDF, JSON or MD. Audio downloads as MP3, and video as MP4 if the meeting was recorded with video on. Paid plans can also remove Fireflies' own branding from the file before saving it.

The route that works on every plan

Fireflies also offers a full account data export, described in its own guide, and this one is not gated by plan. You submit a request through Fireflies' data request form, then approve a confirmation email sent from fred@fireflies.ai with the subject "Action Required – Confirm Your Data Export Request." Once approved, Fireflies emails a download link within 24 to 48 hours. The export bundles meeting recordings as MP3 and MP4, transcripts as TXT with speaker identification, AI summaries as TXT, attendee details, and the rest of the metadata as JSON.

The one detail that trips people up: the download link is valid for 7 days. Miss that window and the guide's own instructions are to submit a new request and wait another 24 to 48 hours. If cancellation has a deadline attached — a renewal date, a seat being removed — the export has to be requested with more than a week of runway, not the day before.

What the export does not settle

An export is about getting your own files out; it does not answer the separate question of what Fireflies already did with a recording before you asked for it. Fireflies' home page states that your data is never used for AI training or any purpose outside your direct business needs, and that you keep ownership and control under its terms of service — a clear, specific commitment, worth reading in its own words rather than through this or any other comparison. Downloading your files does not change anything about a call that already happened; it only stops new calls from being added to the account.

What the export leaves out even when it works

Fireflies' higher tiers meter some features on a monthly credit allowance rather than a flat unlimited — advanced AI summaries, action-item extraction and the AskFred assistant among them. Those outputs, when they exist, ride along inside the plain summary text an export produces, but the credit system itself, the assistant's ability to answer a follow-up question about a meeting, and anything AskFred generated interactively rather than as a saved summary do not travel in any export format. If a meeting's real value was an answer AskFred gave about it rather than the transcript itself, that answer is gone once the account closes, regardless of which export path was used to save everything else.

Why nothing imports automatically

Fireflies' transcript comes from audio its own bot joined and captured on its own infrastructure — by invitation to fred@fireflies.ai or by autojoining a calendar meeting, per its home page. Coii AudioNotes never saw that audio and has no way to reconstruct the speaker turns or timing the way Fireflies' system originally produced them; an importer that tried would be inventing details the export does not actually carry in a form this app could read. What works instead is treating the export as the archive of everything Fireflies captured, and letting Coii AudioNotes start an independent one for meetings recorded from here on your own Mac.

What a workspace admin can and cannot pull for you

Fireflies' own knowledge base article on post-meeting admin controls says a workspace admin can download the transcript, summary, audio and video of any meeting recorded in the workspace — but only meetings that meeting's own privacy setting actually makes visible to them. A meeting marked "Only Owner" or restricted to its participants stays out of an admin's reach even on an Enterprise plan, and a private channel's meetings are visible only to members of that channel.

That is a genuinely different shape from some other team notetakers, where an admin's export rights are either broader or narrower by default, so it is worth stating precisely rather than assuming. If you administer a Fireflies workspace and a departing colleague's meetings matter to the team, the window to act is while their account is still active and their meetings are still set to a visibility the admin console can see — not after the seat is already gone, when nobody is left who could change a meeting's privacy setting to make it retrievable.

For a solo account leaving on your own, this section does not apply at all: there is no admin but you, and everything you attended is already yours to export either way.

The sequence that avoids losing anything

1. Check your plan first. Pro and above can download meeting by meeting; Free has to use the account-wide export. Knowing which one you are on before you start saves a wasted attempt at a button that is not there.
2. On Pro and above, pull anything you need in the format you'll actually reopen — DOCX or PDF for reading, SRT if timed captions matter, MP3 for any recording where the exact audio might be needed later.
3. On any plan, submit the account-wide export request as a backstop even if you also do per-meeting downloads, since it is the only route that captures everything in one pass, including attendee metadata the per-meeting download does not.
4. Approve the confirmation email promptly. The export does not start processing until you do, and a confirmation sitting unread in a spam folder is the most common reason an export never arrives.
5. Download within the 7-day window and save the files somewhere permanent — not a downloads folder that gets cleared automatically.
6. Identify which meetings depended on the bot attending without you, because those are the ones a manual-start app structurally cannot cover, and decide now whether a colleague records them or they go uncaptured.
7. Cancel on your own schedule, once the export is confirmed and readable.
8. Start recording new meetings in Coii AudioNotes. Thirty days, every feature unlocked, no card and no account, so the switch costs nothing to try before the Fireflies subscription actually lapses.

What changes day to day

The mechanical change is smaller than the plan-gate question above, but it is the one that lasts. Fireflies can be invited to a meeting or set to autojoin a calendar entry, so a call gets captured whether or not the person who needed it remembered anything. Coii AudioNotes has no invitation to send and no calendar to watch — recording starts because a person at the Mac pressed the key for it, and if nobody does, nothing is recorded. For meetings you are reliably in yourself, this costs a week of building the habit and then nothing. For the meetings a colleague used to attend on your behalf, or the ones you occasionally double-book, this is a genuine capability lost, not a habit to fix — plan for those specifically rather than discovering the gap the first time one happens.

What arrives in exchange is that a captured meeting stops depending on an account staying open or a link staying valid for its 7 days. The recording, the transcript and the summary are files in a folder the moment they exist, covered by whatever backup already runs on that Mac, readable by anything, with nothing to request and nothing to expire.

The questions worth answering before you cancel

Was the bot doing work you actually needed, or work nobody was watching for? If most invitations to Fireflies happened because it was the default rather than because a specific meeting needed unattended coverage, the switch to a manual-start app is smaller than it feels. If specific recurring calls only exist in the archive because nobody in the room remembered to record and the bot did it anyway, name those calls now and solve them separately — asking a colleague to run their own copy of Coii AudioNotes, or accepting that particular series stays uncaptured.

Is anyone downstream expecting Fireflies' format specifically? A workflow that pipes a Fireflies transcript into another tool, or a habit of pulling the SRT for captions, is built around Fireflies' particular export shape. Nothing about Coii AudioNotes reproduces that shape — it writes plain text and generates its own minutes — so a process depending on the exact format needs to be repointed once, deliberately, rather than discovered broken later.

Does the free-tier gate change the timeline? If you are on Free and only just learned that per-meeting download is not available to you, budget the 24-to-48-hour processing time and the 7-day link window into your cancellation date now, rather than requesting the export the day the subscription is due to end.

What this does not solve

If the reason for leaving is Fireflies' storage minutes running out on a lower tier, or a security review that wants recordings never to reach a third party's infrastructure at all, moving to Coii AudioNotes answers that specific question and nothing broader. It does not give you a searchable team archive, CRM integrations, a phone app, or a bot that captures a meeting nobody personally attended — Fireflies has all of those and Coii AudioNotes has none of them. A team that relies on any of those should read that comparison in full before committing, because for a team the honest answer is often to stay.

What Coii AudioNotes solves is narrower: the recording, the transcript and the summary staying on the Mac that made them, for $19 once instead of a per-seat subscription that keeps renewing. If that is the actual reason the export form got opened, the sequence above is the whole path from here.

See the full Coii AudioNotes vs Fireflies comparison, other tools worth weighing at the best Fireflies alternatives, and what a meeting bot actually is if that is the part of Fireflies you are trying to leave behind. Two similar moves are covered at migrating from Granola and migrating from Otter if either is also on your list. When the export is saved, download Coii AudioNotes and record the next real meeting rather than a test — that is the one that shows whether the habit change is worth it, and recording without a bot in the room is what it looks like once it sticks.