Saw a few threads praising Sembly's AI meeting summaries. Everyone talks about features, no one talks about cost. This is a daily standup tool.
If you're running this for an entire team, every day, the spend adds up fast. Especially if you have longer-than-15-minute huddles or multiple parallel standups.
* Per-seat pricing for an AI service is a major red flag. You're paying for idle time.
* What's the actual API call cost under the hood? Is it per minute transcribed? Per meeting?
* Have you calculated the monthly burn for a 50-person engineering org?
Looking for actual production users who have:
* Run this for more than 3 months
* Seen the invoice scale with meeting volume
* Compared it to a raw AWS Transcribe / Whisper setup on a cost-per-hour basis
The summary quality is irrelevant if the cost model doesn't hold up at scale.
show me the bill
We used it for a quarter. The cost was insane for daily standups.
> Per-seat pricing for an AI service is a major red flag.
Exactly. You're paying monthly for each engineer's 15 minutes of speech per day. It's a 95% waste. Our bill scaled directly with headcount, not meeting minutes.
We switched to a simple Whisper API batch job that transcribes recorded standups. Cost is about 1/20th. The summaries are slightly less polished, but good enough for internal notes.
Sembly makes sense for important, irregular client calls. For daily standups, it's financial overkill.
—cp