Three people in my peer supervision group had been using Fathom. This was maybe six months ago. I brought it up because two different coaches had asked me about it in the same week and I realized I was giving vague answers, which annoyed me. I don't like dismissing or endorsing tools I haven't actually used.
So I spent about two months testing it seriously across different session types. Here's what I found.
What Fathom actually is
For anyone who hasn't encountered it: Fathom is an AI meeting notetaker. You connect it to Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams. It joins your calls as a bot, records the audio and video, transcribes everything, and generates a summary. The free tier is genuinely functional. Paid plans run roughly $19 to $32 per month depending on the plan, and they add team features, longer storage, CRM integrations, and some fancier summary formats.
It was built for sales and business contexts. The people who designed it were thinking about sales teams capturing product feedback, CSMs logging customer conversations, project managers tracking decisions. That matters a lot for how coaches should think about it, because the defaults reflect those use cases, not ours.
What it does well
The transcription accuracy is good. Not perfect, but solid. It handles conversational speech well enough that the raw transcript is usable without heavy editing. If you're doing intake calls or discovery conversations where you want a record of what was actually said, the transcript it produces is a reasonable starting point.
I was skeptical about this because most transcription tools I'd tested struggled with the way coaching conversations move, the pauses, the half-finished sentences, the moments where someone trails off and then redirects. Fathom handles this better than Otter.ai does in my experience, though neither is going to produce a clean academic transcript.
What I actually found useful: I'd paste chunks of the transcript into Margaret and ask for a session prep brief. The quality of the brief was noticeably better than when I was working from handwritten notes alone. More complete, better context around what the client had said versus what they'd seemed to be circling around. I was pulling out patterns I'd processed in the session but not written down, because the full text jogged things that my shorthand notes had compressed out. That was a genuine improvement to my prep workflow.
The highlight feature deserves more attention than it usually gets in reviews. You click a button during the call and Fathom timestamps that moment and clips it for you. I used to make pencil scratches on paper when a client said something worth returning to. Clicking a button is faster, it produces a labeled clip, and it doesn't interrupt my focus the way picking up a pen does. Small thing, but I've used it consistently since the first week.
Storage and search are clean. With the paid tier, you can search across all your transcripts for a word or phrase. I've had at least three situations in the past year where I knew a client had said something important two sessions ago but couldn't reconstruct it from my notes. That search function would have helped. It's not a feature you need every week, but when you need it, it matters.
And the free tier is actually free in a way most free tiers aren't. No five-session trial, no quiet expiration. Unlimited recordings. I tested it for six weeks on the free plan before deciding anything about paying, and in that time I never hit a wall that pushed me toward upgrading just to keep using the core features. That's rarer than it should be.
Where it falls short for coaching
The AI-generated summaries are where Fathom's sales background shows through, and for coaching, it shows through pretty hard.
The default summary structure is built around action items, decisions made, topics discussed, and next steps. That's the right format for a project meeting. For a coaching session, it produces something that reads like a project debrief, which is almost the opposite of what's useful. You get a clean list of what was covered. You don't get anything about tone, about the quality of presence in the room, about the thing a client said three different ways in twenty minutes before they finally said the thing they actually meant.
I spent time customizing the summary prompts, which Fathom does allow to some degree. Better results, but still not what I'd produce from a transcript plus my own context. The summaries are most useful when I treat them as raw material to feed elsewhere rather than as finished notes. If you're hoping the summary itself becomes your session record, you're going to be disappointed within a few sessions.
The second thing: the Fathom bot has a presence. There's a small indicator in the call window that says "Recording and Transcribing." Most clients don't notice, or notice and don't comment. But one client, early in our engagement, asked me mid-session if that was "the recording thing." I said yes, we have consent in our agreement, the data is handled this way. She was fine with it, but we lost the thread of what we'd been talking about, and that particular thread was important. It wasn't a crisis. It was a bump at a moment I'd wanted to stay undisrupted.
My informed consent documentation now covers AI recording tools explicitly, including what tool, what data it stores, and how I use it. That's what it should have included before. Fathom accelerated that update, which was probably overdue regardless.
The privacy question
I want to be direct here because I've seen it glossed over in other reviews.
Fathom records audio, video, and transcript data and stores it on their servers. Their privacy policy covers standard data protection requirements. But the threshold for "standard" in a business meeting context is not the same threshold you need for coaching sessions.
Coaching involves people telling you things they haven't told anyone else. Their relationship with a board that doesn't trust them anymore. The way their anger comes out at home when the pressure at work gets bad. The CEO who doesn't know whether he's effective anymore. That content living on a third-party server, subject to their terms of service and to whatever legal or regulatory processes might someday apply to them, carries a different risk profile than a sales call or a team check-in.
I have clients in regulated industries. I have clients who've shared things that their employers would find uncomfortable. I can't fully evaluate every scenario, but I can tell you that "it's in the terms of service" doesn't settle my discomfort with where session content lives.
The workaround I landed on: I don't run Fathom on paid coaching sessions unless there's a specific reason and we've agreed to it in writing. I use it for discovery calls, intake conversations, and the occasional working session where the client has explicitly asked to have a transcript. That's a narrower use case than I'd imagined when I started testing, but it's the one I can stand behind.
If your practice involves less sensitive territory, this calculus might look different. Know your client relationships and know what they've trusted you with.
Who should pay for it
The free tier covers most of what a solo coach would actually use Fathom for. Unlimited recordings, decent transcription, basic summary. If you're primarily using it on discovery and intake calls to produce transcripts you'll feed into a second tool, you can do that indefinitely for free.
The paid tier becomes worth considering in a few specific situations. If you're doing enough volume that transcript search would save you real time, the paid plan pays for itself quickly. If you want the CRM sync and you're actually using one of the CRMs it integrates with (HubSpot, Salesforce, a few others), that's a legitimate time save. If you're building a group practice and need collaboration features, the team plan makes sense.
For the majority of solo coaches I know, the free tier is where they'll land and stay. The paid features are better for people running higher-volume, team-based practices.
How it compares
Otter.ai has arguably better live transcription if you're in environments with background noise or your clients have strong accents. The search function is slightly better. But the interface is more cluttered and the AI summary quality is similar or worse. Pricing is comparable.
Fireflies.ai is more feature-rich and more team-oriented. Good CRM integrations. Probably overkill for solo practice unless you specifically need the integrations or the more detailed analytics.
One alternative worth mentioning for coaches with stricter privacy requirements: local transcription with Whisper. It runs on your computer, nothing leaves your machine, and the accuracy is excellent. The tradeoff is setup time, no live transcription, and post-call processing that takes ten to twenty minutes depending on session length and hardware. I use this for sessions where I record locally and have specific reasons for keeping everything on-device. Not for everyone, the setup requires some comfort with command-line tools, but the option exists and it's free once it's running.
I did a write-up on that workflow a while back. If you're in a context where data jurisdiction matters (regulated industry clients, international clients with EU data obligations), it's worth knowing the option is there before you default to a cloud-based tool.
The actual verdict
Fathom is a well-made tool that does exactly what it describes. The fact that it wasn't designed for coaching isn't a complaint, it's context. If you know what it is and what it was built for, you can use the parts that translate well and ignore the parts that don't.
For discovery calls and intake conversations, I use it. The transcription is good, the highlight feature has changed how I capture moments worth returning to, and the transcript-to-prep-brief workflow with Margaret has improved my session quality on those calls. For paid coaching sessions, I've made a deliberate choice not to run it by default.
Whether the paid tier is worth it depends almost entirely on volume and whether you'll actually use transcript search. If you're running two or three calls a week and using it primarily to produce input for better notes, the free tier is enough.
The thing I'd push back on with any recording tool is the idea that it solves the notes problem. I've seen coaches get genuinely excited about Fathom because the demo makes it look like the session summary writes itself, and then two months later they're still spending Sunday afternoons on notes, just with a transcript open in a second tab. The transcript is an input. A good input. Not a finished product.
The synthesis, figuring out what mattered in that conversation and why, is still yours to do. It probably should be.
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Fathom's free tier is available at fathom.video. At time of writing, paid plans start at $19/month. No affiliate relationship; I just tested the tool.