Fathom alternative
The Fathom alternative for calls a bot was never invited to
Fathom is good at scheduled video calls. Your billable hours are not all scheduled video calls. Superscribe Phone records the client call you take walking to the car and the meeting around a table, on the number you already answer.
Superscribe
Stop rebuilding calls from memory
Use Superscribe to capture the words, context, next steps, and time while the work is still happening.
If you are looking for a Fathom alternative, it is usually not because Fathom broke. It is because half of the conversations you get paid for never had a calendar link. The discovery call you took in the car park. The client who rang about scope while you were walking between two other things. The workshop around a table where three people argued about the timeline and then agreed to something that changes the invoice.
Fathom needs a scheduled video meeting and a bot that can join it, and inside that assumption it does its job. So the honest version of the Fathom alternative question is not “what replaces Fathom.” It is “what covers the conversations Fathom cannot see.” That is where the unpaid recap work comes from, because nothing recorded it and you rebuild it from memory two days later.
What Fathom is good at, and where it stops
Fathom is built around one assumption: there is a link, a bot joins it, and a recording plus a summary follow. If every conversation you bill for happens on Zoom, Meet or Teams, keep Fathom and close this page.
The assumption breaks in ordinary places. A client calls your mobile instead of booking. You are on site and the meeting happens in a room. A five minute check-in turns into the real conversation about scope. In each case there is no link to send a bot to, so there is no record, and the record is the part you needed.
| The conversation | Fathom | Superscribe Phone |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduled Zoom, Meet or Teams call | A bot joins the link | Not covered, it does not join video calls |
| Inbound client call to your mobile | No link, nothing captured | Transcribed on the number you already answer |
| Client meeting in a room | No link, nothing captured | Start meeting, phone on the table, visible recording state |
| Room meeting with one person remote | Everyone needs the link | Dial them in by phone onto the same transcript |
| A quick call that becomes the real meeting | Nothing scheduled, nothing recorded | Already running, because you answered |
| Capture device | Anything that opens the meeting | iPhone only |
Try it on the real workflow
Turn the next client call into finished follow-up
Use Superscribe on a real client call. The call becomes a transcript, a summary and one-tap next steps without the cleanup pass afterwards.
A Fathom alternative for calls that were never scheduled
Superscribe Phone is a free iPhone app. You keep your own number. Clients ring you the way they always have and you answer the way you always have. There is no bot to invite, no new phone system, no porting, no extension for anyone to remember.
When the call ends, you get the transcript, a title, a summary and a short list of suggested actions. Languages are detected automatically, so a call in your client’s language comes back readable without you setting anything. The suggested actions are deliberately few: call someone back, put the agreed time in your calendar, create a reminder, save an unknown caller to your contacts, or turn a list you dictated into a Reminders checklist. Each one is a tap and nothing fires on its own. The time-sensitive ones show on the lock screen with buttons, so the callback you promised does not wait for you to open an app.
For meetings, you tap Start meeting and put the phone on the table. The recording state is visible to everyone in the room, which matters in a client’s office. Anyone remote can be dialled in by phone onto the same transcript. Speakers are separated and named when they introduce themselves. When the meeting stops, the summary, decisions and follow-ups are ready, and the transcript is there when you need the exact wording of what was agreed.
Calls and meetings are filed to the right project automatically and pushed to Pipedrive as an activity. If you use something else, the same structured output can be pulled through the API and MCP.
The recap work you never put on an invoice
This is the real cost, and it never shows up as a line item. The call was forty minutes. The recap you wrote afterwards was twenty. Asking the client to repeat the bit you missed cost you a little credibility as well as ten more minutes.
Multiply that across a week of client calls and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable. It is not that you forgot everything. You remember the shape of the conversation and lose the specifics: the number they said, the date they preferred, the caveat that changes the scope. Then you write a hedged client update, because hedging is what you do when you are not certain what was said.
One pass instead of two
Make the call the record, not the raw material
Run your next week of client calls through Superscribe and write your updates from the summary and the action list instead of from memory.
Why I built the phone side of this first
I am Siim, and I built Superscribe because spoken work kept evaporating. The idea was simple: capture what people actually say in business calls and in dictation, then turn it into text, tasks and billable context, so nobody has to reconstruct their own week from memory.
The phone came first because that is where the reconstruction hurt most. Video meeting tools were already crowded, and they had all made the same choice: wait for a link. Meanwhile the highest-value fifteen minutes of a consulting week is often a call taken standing in a corridor. A tool that only works when you plan ahead misses exactly the conversations you could not plan.
I want to be clear about what it does not do. It does not write your emails. It gives you the summary and the action items you would write one from, and you keep your own voice with the client. Capture is iPhone-only, and the desktop side is dictation, not meeting capture.
Switching, realistically: most people keep both
You do not have to pick a side. If your delivery calls are on video and your sales and site work is on the phone, run Fathom on the video calls and Superscribe Phone on everything else. There is nothing to migrate, because Superscribe does not sit between you and your number. Install it, answer your phone for a week, then look at what it caught that would have been a blank.
For teams, Business Voice adds seats and pooled minutes so a whole consulting team’s calls land in the same place. The solo app is free to start, which is the cheapest way to find out how big the phone half of your work really is.
Questions consultants ask
Do my clients have to install or accept anything? No. They call your number and you answer. There is no bot joining, no app for them, no new number to learn.
Can it record a meeting in a room and someone joining remotely? Yes. Tap Start meeting for the room, and dial the remote person in by phone. They land on the same transcript, with speakers separated and named when they introduce themselves.
Will it write the client follow-up email for me? No. Superscribe does not draft emails or messages. You get the transcript, the summary, the decisions and the suggested actions, and you write the update from those.
Next step
Take your next client call with it running
Pick one real call today. Answer it normally, then look at the summary and the suggested actions before you write anything down.