---
title: "How to Export Granola Notes, Even the Ones Behind the Paywall"
description: "Export Granola notes from the free plan, including meetings locked behind the 30-day limit, then keep them somewhere you can still search and re-read."
canonical: "https://hirekai.ai/blog/export-granola-notes"
date_published: "2026-07-23"
last_updated: "2026-07-23"
article_type: "guide"
author: "lambert"
---
# How to Export Granola Notes, Even the Ones Behind the Paywall

### Key takeaways

- Granola's free plan hides notes older than 30 days but doesn't delete them. The CSV export at Settings, Profile, Generate CSV reaches the locked ones too.
- We ran a real free-plan export in July 2026: 75 meetings, seven months of history, full transcripts on every row. So "Granola has no export" is out of date.
- Watch the edges: only notes that have a summary are included, the file comes by email, and there are no speaker labels in the transcript.
- A CSV is a dead file the day you download it. To keep old meetings useful, import them somewhere you can still search and ask questions, which is the part Kai handles.

I work on Kai, our [AI executive assistant](/blog/ai-executive-assistant), and one of the things I spent last month building was an importer that reads a Granola export and pulls your meetings into Kai. I built it because I hit the wall myself. Granola's free plan only lets you open notes from the last 30 days, and I had months of calls I could no longer read. If you want to export Granola notes and actually keep them, the good news is the export is real, it's free, and it reaches the meetings the app has already locked. The path just isn't where most articles say it is.

Half the write-ups you'll find claim Granola has no export at all. One teardown puts it plainly: "there's no easy export function, which means copy and paste is your only option for getting notes out of the system" ([MeetingNotes](https://meetingnotes.com/blog/granola-ai-teardown)). That was true once. It isn't now. There's a one-click CSV export sitting in Settings, and it doesn't stop at the 30-day line. This guide is only about getting your notes out. Our [full Granola review](/blog/granola-review) covers the product itself, and [Bluedot vs Granola](/blog/bluedot-vs-granola) and [Fathom vs Granola](/blog/fathom-vs-granola) put it against its closest rivals.

Here's what this guide covers:

- What Granola's 30-day lock actually does to your notes
- What it really takes to keep meeting notes you can still use
- The exact export path, step by step, with what the file contains
- Where to put the export so it doesn't turn back into a dead file

## What Granola's 30-day lock actually does

Granola's free tier, called Basic, limits you to the last 30 days of note history in the app. Older notes don't get deleted. They're stored on Granola's servers, just hidden from you until you pay. Granola's own billing docs say it directly: notes older than 30 days "are not deleted, we keep them stored, but they are not accessible in Granola," and upgrading restores "access to your entire note history" (Granola billing docs).

The lock arrived with Granola's February 2026 rebrand, which also reset pricing. Earlier free plans kept your notes indefinitely. The tier that unlocks full history now is Business at 14 dollars per user per month.

| Plan | Price | Note history |
|---|---|---|
| Basic (free) | 0 dollars | Last 30 days in the app |
| Business | 14 dollars/user/mo | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | 35 dollars/user/mo and up | Unlimited |

Source: [Granola pricing](https://www.granola.ai/pricing). *Verified 2026-07-23*. Granola bills monthly, per seat, with no annual discount.

> The paywall hides your history, it doesn't erase it. Notes older than 30 days sit on Granola's servers the whole time you're locked out, which is exactly why the export can still reach them.

The lock isn't unique to Granola either. The same data-lock pattern runs through the category, from [Otter's export limits](/blog/otter-ai-alternatives) to how [Read AI handles meeting notes](/blog/read-ai-meeting-notes).

## What it takes to keep notes you can still use

Downloading a file isn't the same as keeping your notes. If the goal is to still get value from an old meeting six months from now, four things have to be true.

1. **It has to reach the locked meetings.** A backup that only grabs the last 30 days is the same trap with extra steps. You need the full history, including everything the app won't open.
2. **It has to carry the real content.** A title and a date tell you a meeting happened. The summary and the transcript tell you what was decided and what was said, which is the real job of your [meeting notes](/blog/how-to-take-meeting-notes) and of any [minutes](/blog/how-to-write-meeting-minutes) you write from them.
3. **It can't re-expire.** A CSV is a snapshot from the moment you generated it. New meetings won't appear in it, and neither will anything you forgot to export.
4. **You have to be able to find things in it.** A 50,000-character transcript in a spreadsheet cell is technically saved and practically unusable. The point of keeping notes is answering a question later.

The first two are about the export itself. The last two are about where the export lands. Miss either half and you've archived a folder you'll never open again.

![The whole path: notes locked in Granola's free plan, exported as a free CSV, imported into Kai, then readable and searchable, with a branch where the import also teaches Kai's memory](/blog/images/export-granola-notes/granola-keep-notes-flow.svg)

## Why copy-paste falls short

The advice you'll usually find is to open each meeting and copy the text into a document before it locks. That works for the three meetings you remember. It falls apart at the scale where the lock actually hurts.

I had months of calls to save. Doing that by hand, one meeting at a time, is exactly the kind of task nobody finishes. It's why a small economy of scripts exists to pull Granola data out programmatically. One developer reverse-engineered the desktop app to find the endpoint that holds the notes, after Granola support "said they don't have an API" ([Joseph Thacker](https://josephthacker.com/hacking/2025/05/08/reverse-engineering-granola-notes.html)). Another wrote a Claude Code script specifically to reach "free-tier full history, files on disk" ([Daniel Moon](https://medium.com/@danielmoon_65473/reverse-engineering-granolas-data-export-with-claude-code-and-a-script-to-do-it-d3d292452a43)). There are more than a dozen of these on GitHub, like [granary](https://github.com/wassimk/granary), which "preserves transcripts even after Granola purges them from its cache."

When people write code to get their own notes out of a product, the friction is real. But you don't need to write anything. The official export does the heavy lifting.

## How to export Granola notes, step by step

### Step 1: generate the CSV

Open Granola on desktop, go to Settings, then Profile, and click Generate CSV. That's the whole trigger. The file doesn't download in the app. Granola emails it to you within a few hours, the download link is valid for 24 hours, and you can run one export per 24 hours per account.

One thing to know before you count rows: the export only includes notes that have a summary, and it skips deleted notes and any note without one, so the count can come out lower than what the app showed you (Granola export docs).

### Step 2: check what you actually got

This is where the internet contradicts itself, so I ran a real export from a free account in July 2026 and opened the file. Here's the exact shape of it, with a couple of fields simplified.

![A sample of the Granola CSV export: three meetings including a December 2025 one that the 30-day lock hides in the app, each row carrying its full transcript](/blog/images/export-granola-notes/granola-csv-sample.svg)

Three things stood out. The oldest row was from December 2025, seven months before the export, so the file genuinely reaches meetings the 30-day lock had hidden. Every row had a full transcript, averaging around 21,000 characters. And the `notes` column was empty on all of them.

That last one worried me until I understood it. The `notes` column is meant for the notes you type yourself during a call. Granola's whole model is that it folds your typed notes into the AI summary, so if you barely type, that column comes out blank while the summary holds the substance. Your live notes aren't missing, they're baked into the summary.

> Granola's own docs disagree on transcripts. The export page says the CSV includes them, the billing page says "titles and summaries" only. Our July 2026 export carried full transcripts, but Granola could change this, so run a fresh export and check yours before you rely on it.

The other edge is speaker labels: there aren't any. The transcript reads as one continuous voice, so you can see what was said but not cleanly who said it. Granola never stores the audio either, so there's no recording to fall back on, which is part of a wider [recording and consent](/blog/ai-meetings-consent) tradeoff across these tools.

### Step 3: put it somewhere it won't re-expire

Now you're holding a spreadsheet with a few dozen meetings crammed into it. That's the archive done, and the archive is also the problem. Nobody opens a CSV to remember what their accountant said in March.

> Don't stop at the CSV. A spreadsheet is a backup, not a memory. The value comes from putting the meetings somewhere you can still ask questions of them later.

You have a few real options. You can import the CSV into a note tool or a database and browse it there. Granola also has a native move: its account-to-account transfer moves all your notes and transcripts, including the locked ones, into a second Granola account, though it's destructive to the first account and that second one starts its own 30-day clock on the free plan. Or you can import the meetings into a tool built to answer questions across them, which is the option I actually use, and the one I built the importer for.

## Tools that handle this today

A quick, honest read on where each option lands.

- **The Granola account transfer** keeps you inside Granola and preserves transcripts, but on the free plan the destination account re-locks after 30 days, so you've moved the problem, not solved it.
- **The DIY export scripts** (like [granary](https://github.com/wassimk/granary) or [Daniel Moon's](https://medium.com/@danielmoon_65473/reverse-engineering-granolas-data-export-with-claude-code-and-a-script-to-do-it-d3d292452a43)) give you Markdown files on disk and full control, if you're comfortable running code and reading a `supabase.json` token off your machine.
- **A plain import into a notes app** stores the text but usually leaves you searching by keyword, which isn't much better than the spreadsheet.
- **Kai** reads the CSV and turns each row back into a meeting you can ask about in plain language, next to your email and tasks ([Kai vs Granola](/compare/granola-ai) if you're weighing the two products directly). More on that below.

## Where Kai comes in

The reason I built the Granola importer was a specific, boring problem: my accountant. I had months of calls with him spread across Granola, plus email threads, and no single place that knew all of it. Before I sent him anything I wanted to be sure I wasn't asking about something he'd already answered or scheduled. It's the kind of [meeting prep](/blog/ai-meeting-prep) that should just be automatic.

That's the job the import does. You point Kai at the Granola CSV, and every meeting, including the ones from behind the paywall, becomes something Kai can read. Then you can ask across all of it: "what's the status of my conversations with my accountant, where did we land?" Kai checks the meetings you imported from Granola alongside the emails that mention him, and answers from both. The old notes stop being a dead archive and start doing the one thing notes are for, which is answering the next question.

![Kai's Import data settings, where a Granola export is brought in with one click alongside meeting notes from other tools](/blog/images/export-granola-notes/kai-import-panel.webp)

The same import can top up Kai's memory, so the people and projects in your old Granola calls become context Kai carries into new ones.

![Kai confirming a real Granola import: 75 meetings spanning December 2025 to June 2026, with a checkbox to let Kai learn from them and a note that imports are stored on the device for now](/blog/images/export-granola-notes/kai-import-confirm.webp)

Here's the honest limit. Because Granola's export has no speaker labels, an imported transcript reads as one voice, and Kai can't always tell who said what. We do our best to identify people on import, but a call with four attendees and no diarization is genuinely hard to untangle. If knowing the exact speaker on every line matters to you, that's the one thing the CSV can't give either of us.

## When this is overkill

If you're a light Granola user with a handful of meetings you actually care about, skip all of this and copy those few into a doc. The export, the import, the archive strategy, none of it is worth your afternoon for five meetings.

This matters when you have real history to lose: months of client calls, one-on-ones, or decisions you'll need to reference long after the 30-day window closes. That's the person the lock actually costs something, and the person this workflow is for.

## FAQs

## Frequently asked questions

### Does Granola delete your notes on the free plan?

No. Granola stores notes older than 30 days on its servers but makes them inaccessible in the app until you upgrade (billing docs). The CSV export can still reach them.

### Can you export Granola notes for free?

Yes. The CSV export at Settings, Profile, Generate CSV works on the free Basic plan. It's emailed to you within a few hours and the link lasts 24 hours.

### Does the Granola export include transcripts?

In our July 2026 free-plan export, every meeting carried its full transcript. Granola's own docs are inconsistent on this point, so generate a fresh export and confirm before you rely on it.

### How do you read Granola notes older than 30 days without paying?

Export a CSV, which includes the locked notes, then open or import that file somewhere you can search it. You don't need to upgrade to reach the history, only to browse it inside Granola itself.

### Why is the notes column empty in my Granola export?

That column holds notes you typed yourself during a call. Granola merges your typed notes into the AI summary, so if you type little, the column is blank while the summary still holds the content.

### Does the Granola export show who said what?

No. The transcript has no speaker labels, so it reads as a single voice. That's a limit of the export itself, not of whatever tool you import it into.

## Sitemap

See the full [sitemap](https://hirekai.ai/sitemap.md) for all pages.