The meeting is over. Someone has to write it up: a minute taker, you, or a tool that has it ready within ten minutes. The costs vary enormously. In this guide we put the rates side by side, explain the different kinds of minutes and work out what each option costs per month.
What do you pay for a minute taker?
Freelance minute taker (self-employed)
A freelance minute taker in the Netherlands charges around 45 to 70 euros per hour at published rates. That covers more than the meeting itself: preparation (reading the agenda and the papers), attendance (the full meeting at the table) and the write-up (drafting and sending the minutes). A two-hour meeting therefore takes 3 to 5 working hours in total. That puts a single meeting at 135 to 350 euros.
Through an agency
Through a minute-taking service or a secondment agency, published rates sit around 50 to 65 euros per hour for the same work, and larger agencies quote per assignment. The agency handles the matching, the scheduling and sickness cover, and a half-day minimum booking often applies. What you're really paying for is convenience and certainty.
On the payroll
Employing a minute taker is an option too. In the Netherlands, a salaried minute taker earns around 2,400 to 3,500 euros gross per month (as at August 2026), plus employer's costs on top. It only pays off when there are enough meetings to write up every single week.
In practice, hardly any organisation keeps a minute taker on the payroll. The work usually lands with a secretary, policy officer or office manager who does it alongside their own job. The cost then disappears into hours: every hour spent writing up is an hour not spent on the actual work.
Where do you find a minute taker?
You'll find freelancers through the Dutch writers' association Tekstnet, or on LinkedIn. Agencies such as Notuleerservice Nederland, Het Notuleercentrum and NotulistDirect provide minute takers on site. In both cases, always ask for a sample report first.
Before you hire anyone, it helps to know which type of minutes you actually need. The difference is considerable.
Which minutes do you need?
Not all minutes are the same. Broadly, there are three types.
- Decision-only minutesOnly the decisions, the action points and the main points. Compact and usable; this is what most organisations need after a meeting. AI delivers this as standard.
- Summary reportThe decisions plus a summary of the discussion. Useful when you want a record of how a decision was reached. AI delivers this too.
- Verbatim recordEvery word, broken down by speaker. Common in court cases, council meetings and formal hearings. AI produces a word-for-word transcript with speaker recognition; for the heaviest hearings, organisations often still choose a person.
So AI can produce all three types, including a full transcript with speaker recognition, at a fraction of the cost. Which tools do this well is covered in the guide to the best AI notetakers.
The alternative: one fixed price, no hourly rate.
AI notetaking turns the cost model on its head. No hourly rate and no invoice per meeting, but one fixed monthly price for unlimited notetaking. There's nothing to prepare and nothing to write up afterwards: the report writes itself while you're already on to the next thing.
Notuly is the AI notetaker for every conversation: discreet in-person, hybrid and online. Around the table, you put your phone in the middle; for meetings on Teams, Zoom or Google Meet you use the desktop app for macOS and Windows. No bot joining your meeting, no participants watching their words.
Afterwards the meeting report is in everyone's inbox, containing:
- a summary of the conversation;
- the decisions that were taken;
- action points with a name and a deadline: "Sam sends the proposal to Daniël on Friday";
- the full transcript with speaker recognition, optionally as an attachment.
Notuly understands more than 90 spoken languages and delivers the report in Dutch or English. How the processing works, from recording to report, is explained under automatic meeting notes.
What does minute-taking cost per month?
Say your team meets eight times a month, two hours at a time. The sums then look like this.
| Option | Per meeting (2 hours) | Per month (8 meetings) |
|---|---|---|
| Hiring a minute taker | 135–350 euros, incl. preparation and write-up | 1,080–2,800 euros |
| Doing it yourself | 20–45 minutes of write-up time | 3–6 hours of your own time, plus patchy notes and arguments afterwards |
| AI notetaking | 0 minutes of write-up time | One fixed monthly price, unlimited conversations and unlimited recording length |
The difference isn't only money. Take the minutes yourself and you pay in attention: you're taking notes instead of taking part. And attention is precisely the most expensive part of any meeting.
See what Notuly costs per month →
Even in complex meetings.
Notuly holds up in complex meetings too. Someone half committing to something and then rowing back, a discussion that goes off in every direction: Notuly picks it up. You read back what was actually agreed, not just the headline.
Even so, there are situations where organisations deliberately choose a person in the room. Council sessions or disciplinary hearings, for instance, where it's not only about what was said but also about how it lands politically. That's a choice, not a technical limitation. For every other meeting, and that's the vast majority, there's no need to hire a minute taker at a few hundred euros a meeting.
Who's making the switch?
Mostly professionals who'd rather talk than take notes. Sales teams have the report of a client conversation before they're back at the car. In construction, the site meeting in the cabin goes straight out to everyone with the action points. Local government teams capture every meeting in line with the GDPR, and consultants keep more billable hours by cutting the admin.