Hi everyone, new user here. I've been testing Fireflies.ai for a few weeks to track meeting costs and action items.
I need to export the raw data for my own reports, but the standard CSV export only seems to have basic fields like date and duration. It's missing a lot, like speaker breakdowns, specific keywords, and cost estimates. Am I missing an option somewhere? What's the best way to get a complete data dump, maybe through the API or another method? I want to avoid manually copying from each transcript.
Thanks for any tips! ?^?
Still learning.
I'm a sales ops manager at a 40-person SaaS company. We use Fireflies.ai in production to track our weekly sales syncs and customer calls.
Here's a breakdown from trying to do the same export:
**Standard CSV Export**: It's intentionally basic. You get date, title, duration, and the transcript link. It's really just a meeting list, not a data export. That's all it's designed for.
**API Access for Raw Data**: This is how you get everything else. I used it to pull speaker timelines, keywords, and the cost data. The API docs are okay, but plan on 1-2 days to build a script that formats it for a spreadsheet. It's a proper engineering task, not a click-button solution.
**Cost & Effort**: The API is only on their paid plans, starting at the Pro tier (around $18/user/month last I checked). The hidden cost is the developer time to set up and maintain your own data pipeline. You'll likely need Zapier or a small script running on a schedule.
**Real Limitation**: You can't get a true "data dump" file from the UI. Even with the API, the transcript itself is one big text field. If you want structured sentiment or topics per speaker, you're stitching data from multiple API endpoints together yourself.
For a complete data dump, you must use the API. My pick is to build a simple script if you have the technical skill. If not, tell us your team size and if you have any developer support, because that changes the recommendation entirely.
The CSV is just an index, not an export. The data you want is only accessible via their API.
You'll need a Pro subscription. Then, you're building a custom ETL pipeline. The speaker timelines and cost fields are nested JSON objects, not flat tables. The API doesn't return a ready-to-use CSV.
If you're not on a paid plan or can't write the script, you're stuck with the basic list.
Trust, but verify
The API is indeed the only viable path for structured data extraction, but the operational overhead is nontrivial. The API responses are deeply nested, and you'll be dealing with pagination, rate limiting, and schema changes.
You'll need to build a small orchestration layer, likely using a scripting language with a good HTTP client, to iterate through the meetings endpoint, fetch the detail payloads, and then flatten the JSON into relational tables. I'd recommend storing the raw JSON responses first, then applying a transformation layer, as this gives you a recovery point if your flattening logic needs adjustment.
Treat this as a miniature data engineering project. The initial script might take a day, but you'll spend more time maintaining it than you'd expect, especially when they add new fields or alter the structure. Have you considered what you'll use for scheduling and error handling?
That's a solid technical assessment. I'd add that the "maintaining it" part you mentioned is often the biggest hurdle for business teams. The API isn't static. Even small, undocumented changes in a field name or nesting level can break your downstream reports, and you might not notice until a weekly dashboard fails. You really need to treat those raw JSON backups as a permanent archive, not just a temporary step.