OpenAI Whisper API
the only entry whose model you can legally run yourself for free — which makes it the yardstick for everything else here.
not the most accurate and not the cheapest, but the only one where the managed price and the self-hosted price are the same model — and it doesn't train on your audio.
whisper's weights are mit-licensed across every size from tiny to large-v3, so the model openai bills $0.36 an hour for is one you can run on your own gpu for the cost of electricity. no other vendor here offers that exit, and it means every managed price on this page should be read as a convenience premium over a known free alternative.
openai's api data controls state that audio sent to the transcription endpoints is not used for training unless you opt in, with roughly 30-day retention for abuse monitoring and stricter terms available. that is the correct default and only gladia matches it.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- speech-to-text apis
- pricing
- $0.18/hr
- website
- platform.openai.com
not the most accurate and not the cheapest, but the only one where the managed price and the self-hosted price are the same model — and it doesn't train on your audio.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.
more speech-to-text apis
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.