Summary
Heidi has a real free tier, capped at ten actions a month.1 Freed gives you seven days without a card.2 Both are worth using and neither is a plan you can run a practice on.
The thing to check on any free tool is whether it will sign a business associate agreement.3 If it will not, it cannot touch a patient encounter, and free stops being the relevant question.
Fourteen days of the whole product. Letters, coding and the briefing on every plan.
Book a demoWhat free gets you
Heidi's free tier is the most generous in the category. Unlimited basic transcription, capped at ten actions a month, which is roughly two working days for most clinicians. It is a genuine way to find out whether ambient AI suits you at all and we would tell you to try it.
Freed gives you seven days with no card. Freed does not have a permanent free tier.
Beyond that, free in this category means one of three things. A trial. A cap. Or a consumer transcription app that has no business being near a patient.
What free costs
The first question is the BAA. Any tool handling your audio, transcript or draft note is a business associate under 45 CFR 160.103 and has to sign one before it touches an encounter. Consumer transcription tools will not. Using one on a patient visit makes you solely liable for whatever happens to that data, and the fact that it cost nothing is not a defence.
The second is the cap. Ten actions a month is a trial, priced as a product. When you hit it you are on Clinician at $150, and EHR push-to-chart is on the tier above that, so the note is drafted and you paste it by hand.
The third is what free tiers do not include anywhere in this category. Letters, coding, and anything that reads your record rather than only listening to your room.
Try before you buy, properly
Free tiers are a good idea and you should use them. Run one for a fortnight on your own list. Then look at where your evening actually went and see whether the note was any of it.
The only randomised trial in this category found the best product cut note-writing time by about 41 seconds and neither product tested reduced after-hours record time.44Lukac PJ, et al. NEJM AI 2025;2(12). A free tier will show you the 41 seconds. It will not show you the rest of the problem, because no scribe reaches it.
What we do
WA\ does not have a free tier. We have 14 days free on Clinician, and a 90-day pilot on Admin that reports revenue, hours saved and patients cared for from your own clinic. The number no scribe on this page reaches is the code. Up to 19 percent of E/M visits are undercoded at roughly $37 each, and Medicare Advantage downcoding runs a reported $28,000 to $74,000 a physician a year without ever showing as a denial.
We would rather give you a fortnight of the whole product than a permanent tenth of it. Letters, coding, cited answers and the pre-consult briefing are on every plan, so a trial shows you what you would actually be buying.
What a fortnight shows you
Ten actions a month shows you whether you like talking to a microphone. Fourteen days of everything shows you whether your six o'clock moves.
Run it on a real list. Then look at what is still open at the end of the day. If it is only notes, a free tier will serve you and we would say so. If it is letters, codes, results and callbacks, you have found the difference between the two products.
What we are not claiming
If your budget is genuinely zero, Heidi's free tier is the best thing available and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Ten actions a month is real and it is more than we give away.
Availability
WA\ Clinician runs a 14-day free trial, no minimum term. Pricing is on one page.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free AI medical scribe?
Heidi has the only substantial permanent free tier in the category. Unlimited basic transcription capped at ten actions a month, which is roughly two working days for most clinicians, and it is a genuine way to find out whether ambient AI suits you at all. Freed offers seven days with no card and no permanent free tier. Beyond those, free in this category means a trial, a cap, or a consumer transcription app that has no business near a patient. WA\ does not have a free tier. We offer 14 days free on the whole product.
Can I use a free transcription app as a medical scribe?
No, unless it will sign a business associate agreement, and consumer transcription tools will not. Any vendor that creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on your behalf is a business associate under 45 CFR 160.103 and must sign a BAA before handling an encounter. Using a tool without one makes you solely liable for whatever happens to that data, and the fact that it cost nothing is not a defence. If the audio of a patient visit leaks from a consumer app, the exposure is yours.
What do free AI scribe tiers not include?
The same things across every vendor. Letters, coding, and anything that reads your record rather than only listening to your room. On Heidi, hitting the ten-action cap puts you on Clinician at $150 per user per month billed annually, and EHR push-to-chart sits on the tier above that, so the note is drafted and you paste it by hand. Free tiers show you the 41 seconds the randomised trial measured. They do not show you the work after the patient leaves, because no scribe reaches it.
A fortnight of everything, not a permanent tenth.
Try Heidi free first. Then try us for a fortnight and compare the whole product against ten actions a month. If it works, the 90-day pilot reports revenue, hours saved and patients cared for from your clinic. If it does not, you have lost a fortnight.
About this article. Written and published by WA\, which does not offer a free tier and has said so. Claims about Heidi and Freed are from their own published material, cited in the margin, and tier structures in this category change frequently. Confirm directly before relying on them. WA\ has no peer-reviewed clinical trials published to date and does not claim any. We have priced every competitor on this page from their own published material, including the tiers where they are a smaller subscription than us and the trial where Nabla beat us. We would rather you had the whole picture and chose someone else than had half of it and chose us.