Zoom AI Pricing in 2026: What ZoomMate Costs and What Is Included
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Zoom AI pricing has two levels, and most articles still describe the old one. The routine AI features, meeting summary, AI notetaking and smart recording, are included at no additional cost with any paid Zoom Workplace plan and consume no AI credits. Above that sits ZoomMate, the paid agentic tier that replaced the $12 per user per month Custom AI Companion add-on when Zoom sunset it on June 1, 2026. ZoomMate is reported to start at about $20 per user per month in North America with 2,200 monthly AI credits. If a comparison page still quotes you $12 for Custom AI Companion, it is describing a product Zoom no longer sells.
That distinction decides your budget, so it is worth being precise about which half you actually need. Here is what each level includes, what the credits meter, what the free Zoom plan does and does not get, and how to tell whether you need the paid tier at all.
What you get at no additional cost
If you pay for Zoom Workplace on any tier, the AI most offices are shopping for is already switched on or one admin toggle away. Zoom builds it into the product rather than selling it as a per-seat upsell, which is genuinely the right call and worth acknowledging before we describe anything you could pay us for.
- Meeting summary. A written recap of the call with next steps pulled out, delivered after the meeting ends.
- AI notetaking. Notes captured during the call without a separate bot joining the room.
- Smart recording. Recordings broken into chapters and highlights so nobody scrubs through 47 minutes to find one decision.
- Chat compose. Drafted replies inside Zoom Team Chat.
The important budgeting detail: these consume no AI credits. Meeting summaries and AI notetaking are not metered. So an office whose only requirement is "I want a readable summary of what was said" has a complete answer at no extra spend, and buying a dedicated notetaker on top of it is usually money spent twice. We would rather say that than sell you something.
What changed in 2026, and why most pricing pages are wrong
Through 2025 and into 2026, Zoom sold a paid add-on called Custom AI Companion at $12 per user per month, aimed at customizing and extending the built-in AI. That product was sunset on June 1, 2026. In its place Zoom launched ZoomMate, which is now a top-level product in Zoom's own navigation alongside Workplace, Contact Center and Phone rather than an add-on buried in a settings page.
The AI Companion name itself is being folded in rather than deleted. Zoom's position is that the underlying intelligence stays embedded across its products, and that ZoomMate is a new surface for searching your data and completing tasks rather than a straight replacement. In practice, when someone asks what the paid tier of Zoom AI costs in late 2026, the answer is ZoomMate, not Custom AI Companion.
Reported North America pricing starts at about $20 per user per month, including 2,200 AI credits per user per month that pool across the organization and refresh monthly. It is available as an add-on to Zoom Workplace or as a standalone subscription. We flag that as a reported starting rate rather than a figure we read on Zoom's own US pricing page, because Zoom's site serves regional currency to us and we would rather label a number honestly than convert one and hope.
What the AI credits actually meter
This is the part that catches finance teams out, because credit pricing behaves nothing like per-seat pricing. Credits are consumed by agentic work: task execution, workflows, agentic search across your Zoom content and connected apps, the AI doing things rather than describing them. Different tasks consume different amounts.
What credits do not meter is the routine stuff listed earlier. Meeting summaries, AI notetaking and Zoom Canvas do not draw down the balance. So the mental model is:
| What you want | What it costs | Metered by credits |
|---|---|---|
| Summary of what was said | Included with any paid Zoom Workplace plan | No |
| Notes captured during the call | Included with any paid Zoom Workplace plan | No |
| Recording chapters and highlights | Included with any paid Zoom Workplace plan | No |
| AI that searches your past meetings and acts | ZoomMate, from about $20 per user per month | Yes |
| Workflows and task execution inside Zoom | ZoomMate, from about $20 per user per month | Yes |
Because the credits pool across the organization, usage is lumpy in a way seat licensing is not. A team that leans hard on agentic search in one busy month can draw down a balance that looked generous when it was bought. That is not a reason to avoid it, but it is a reason to watch the first two months rather than setting it and forgetting it, and per-seat software has a habit of drifting anyway as headcount moves and nobody reconciles the invoice against who is still using it. Offices that have been burned by that tend to see what their per-seat software actually adds up to across every subscription before adding another line to it.
Does the free Zoom plan include AI?
No. The AI features are tied to paid Zoom Workplace plans, so the free Basic tier does not get meeting summaries or AI notetaking. If you are on Basic and want AI notes, your two routes are upgrading to a paid Zoom plan, which gets you the AI as part of the deal, or running a third-party notetaker alongside the free plan. For most businesses the first is better value, because the paid plan also removes the 40-minute group meeting limit that is usually the real reason people upgrade.
How this compares to buying a dedicated notetaker
Once Zoom's included summary is on the table, the case for a separate notetaker gets narrower than the category's marketing suggests. Dedicated tools still win on specific things: deeper verbatim transcripts, a searchable archive across every meeting you have ever had, better speaker identification, and crucially, coverage when your meetings are not all on Zoom. An office that runs Zoom for clients and Google Meet internally is not served by a Zoom-only feature.
What they do not win on is price, when Zoom's version costs nothing extra. We keep an honest ranking of that category, including which tool is the better buy when it is not us, on the best AI note taker roundup, and the wider per-seat versus per-office math is broken down in what an AI meeting assistant actually costs. If your stack is Microsoft rather than Zoom, the equivalent licensing puzzle is untangled on the Microsoft Teams integration page, where the answer is different: Teams charges for its recap where Zoom does not.
Do you actually need the paid tier?
Three questions settle it faster than a trial does.
Is the thing you want a summary? Then you are already paying for it and you need neither ZoomMate nor a notetaker. Turn it on and stop shopping.
Do you want AI to search across everything your company has discussed? That is the genuine case for ZoomMate, and the credits are what you are buying. It is a real capability that the included tier does not have.
Is the thing that keeps breaking the follow-through? This is the one people misdiagnose most often, and it is worth naming because no amount of summary quality fixes it. If your problem is that six things were promised on the call and none of them happened, the constraint is not note taking. It is that nothing turned those promises into tasks with a named owner and a date, and nothing chased the owner when the date passed. A summary that lists next steps is not the same as somebody making the next steps happen. That gap is what an AI assistant for Zoom meetings is for, and it is a different purchase from a notetaker at a different price point.
The short version
Meeting summaries, AI notetaking and smart recording are included with any paid Zoom Workplace plan and consume no AI credits, so most offices need to spend nothing extra to get AI meeting notes on Zoom. The free Basic plan does not include them. The paid tier is now ZoomMate, which replaced the $12 Custom AI Companion add-on when Zoom sunset it on June 1, 2026, and it is reported to start around $20 per user per month with 2,200 pooled monthly credits that meter agentic work rather than summaries. Buy the paid tier if you want AI that searches and acts across your Zoom data. Do not buy it, or a notetaker, if what you actually needed was a summary, because you already have one.