speech-to-text apis
every price converted to the same unit — dollars per hour of audio — plus the two things that change it: whether diarization costs extra, and whether the cheap rate assumes they can train on your recordings.
12 listed · 9 of them researched by us · featured first, then most upvoted
WhisperX
whisper with word-level timestamps and speaker diarisation, self-hosted
Gladia
we checked this$0.61/hrthe only vendor here that makes not training on your audio the contractual default, with diarization thrown in free.
AssemblyAI
we checked this$0.15/hrcheapest managed batch transcription, quoted in the right unit — with streaming billed by the clock, not the audio.
ElevenLabs Scribe
we checked this$0.22/hrtop of the independent accuracy leaderboard at $0.22 an hour — or nine times that if you pay the wrong way.
OpenAI Whisper API
we checked this$0.18/hrthe only entry whose model you can legally run yourself for free — which makes it the yardstick for everything else here.
Rev AI
we checked this$0.10/hrten cents an hour — the cheapest number in this ranking, attached to the least complete pricing page.
Deepgram
we checked this$0.462/hrthe clearest pricing table here, for a price that assumes your recordings become their training data.
Speechmatics
we checked this$0.129/hrbuilt for regulated on-premise deployment, with a pricing page that won't separate batch from real-time.
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