Vinyl

Billing is the first thing that distinguishes Vinyl from the per-seat assistants. Firms buy meeting hours, not seats: $89 a month for 20 hours, $249 for 60, $649 for 150, with overage between 14 and 18 cents a minute and unlimited users on every plan. A ten-person firm where three partners run most of the client calls and everyone else needs to read the notes pays the same as a three-person firm doing the same volume. Prices are published in USD, GBP and AUD, and a sizing calculator on the pricing page recommends a plan from headcount and meeting frequency.

The product itself joins Zoom, Teams and Google Meet, records in-person meetings through a mobile app, and organises everything by group, client and contact, breaking discussion points and actions out per entity when a call covers several related companies. Notes and actions post to Karbon client timelines and file into FYI client records, clients and contacts sync in from Xero Practice Manager, and a transcript can be turned into an Ignition, Anchor or Socket proposal. A revenue opportunity feature scans transcripts for buying signals, scores each by confidence and urgency, and shows the client's own words as evidence rather than a paraphrase.

The security and privacy FAQ is candid enough to be useful, and what it says will matter to a US firm. Data is stored on servers in Australia, with transcription and summarisation processed in the United States by AssemblyAI and Anthropic. Meeting content is not used to train Vinyl's AI. Deleted accounts are cleared within 30 days. MFA is supported, encryption is TLS 1.2 and AES-256, and penetration testing is described as regular. The compliance answer is the honest weak one: Vinyl points to AWS holding ISO 27001 and SOC 1, 2 and 3 rather than claiming any audit of its own, which is not the same thing and should not be presented to a client as if it were. On consent, Vinyl states the obligation clearly, tells firms to inform participants and allow opt-out, and supplies notification templates, while leaving the legal responsibility with the firm.

The gaps for a US buyer are structural rather than fixable in a release. The practice management integrations are Karbon, FYI and Xero Practice Manager, which is the Xero and Australasian stack. TaxDome, Canopy, Financial Cents and every US tax package are absent. Support hours are published as 9am to 5pm AEST, which is overnight for most of the United States, and the privacy FAQ has carried an effective date of March 2025 for well over a year. There is also no refund policy: all sales are final.

Ping and Abacor are the US-built comparisons. Both keep data in the US, both connect to Financial Cents, and Ping publishes per-seat pricing that will beat Vinyl for a firm with few meeting hosts. Vinyl wins where a firm is on Karbon or FYI, has a lot of people who need to read notes and few who record them, and cares more about proposal generation than about email triage. That combination is real, and it is why the inherited top-pick moves to strong-option rather than lower: Australian data residency, AEST-only support, no independent SOC 2 report and no US practice management coverage beyond Karbon are too many caveats for a default recommendation to a US firm, but none of them touch a Xero-ecosystem firm that already lives in that stack.