Google Meet for business: participants, recording and AI notes by edition

Start from what you need the call to do

Rather than reading feature lists, work backwards from your meetings.

• Internal stand-ups and client calls, nothing recorded. Business Starter is enough.
• You need a recording afterwards, for a training session, a class or a call the absent partner has to watch. That starts at Business Standard.
• Training with small group work, so you need breakout rooms. Business Standard.
• You have to prove who attended, for a course, a board meeting or a donor session. Attendance tracking is Business Plus only.
• More than 150 people at once. Business Plus, which raises the room to 500.
• Broadcast to thousands who only watch. Live streaming is not in any Business edition. It belongs to Enterprise and Education Plus.

Google Meet by Workspace edition

Note the row that does not change. All three editions allow a meeting to run for up to 24 hours, so length is never the reason to upgrade. Recording is.

Free Meet against Meet on a work account

Anyone with a Google account can start a Meet call for free, which is why so many small offices in Nepal never think about it. The limit appears the moment a third person joins. On a free personal account, a group call with three or more participants is cut off at 60 minutes. One-to-one calls are treated differently, which is why a long two-person call works and the same call with a colleague added ends abruptly.

On any paid Workspace edition that ceiling moves to 24 hours, and the meeting runs under your own domain, with your admin controlling who can join and what can be recorded. For an education consultancy running an hour-long counselling session with a student and both parents, that single difference is the whole argument.

Recording, and the rules to set before you use it

Recording is available from Business Standard upwards, and an administrator can turn it on or off for the whole organisation or for a particular organisational unit. Recordings are saved to Drive, which means they draw on your pooled storage. A training team that records two hours a day will notice that on Business Starter storage maths, so plan it against the numbers on our Drive and storage page.

What the AI features in Meet do

Business Standard and Business Plus include Gemini's "Take notes for me", which produces a written summary of the meeting, and speech translation with translated captions. Business Starter includes neither.

Two honest caveats. Translated captions depend on which languages Google supports for that feature, so check the current language list before you promise a client that a Nepali conversation will be captioned in English. And an AI summary is a draft, not minutes: it captures what was said, not what was decided. Someone still has to write down the decision and who owns it. The full picture of what Gemini adds in each edition is on our Gemini in Workspace page.

How teams in Nepal actually use it

Practical tips for calls from Nepal

• Turn video off when the line struggles. Audio survives a poor connection far longer than video does. Agree that cameras off is acceptable rather than dropping the call.
• Have a phone hotspot ready. During a load-shedding notice or an ISP outage, switching to mobile data mid-meeting is faster than rescheduling.
• Use headphones. Noise cancellation helps with background noise, not with echo from laptop speakers.
• Send the link with the calendar invite. A Meet link created inside a Google Calendar event carries the guest list, so people who join are the people you invited.
• Test screen sharing before a client call, especially on a Mac, where the operating system asks for screen recording permission the first time.

Recording, breakout rooms, noise cancellation and Gemini notes all arrive together at Business Standard, which WebsNP supplies at $3.97 per user per month in Nepali rupees. Compare it against the other editions on our Workspace price page.