How Much Does Transcription Cost in 2026? 23 Services Compared

AI transcription in 2026 costs $0.006 to $0.142 per included minute on the entry paid plans of seven apps that meter minutes, with a median of $0.033 on monthly billing. That is about 11 times the $0.003 median of five speech-to-text APIs, while human transcription at Rev costs $1.99 a minute. Free plans range from 45 minutes a month (Rev) to 300 (Otter), and 6 of 18 apps cap a single free recording, from 3 minutes (Notta) to 2 hours (Fireflies).

Key numbers

• The median AI transcription app charged $0.033 per included minute on monthly billing in September 2026, across 7 apps with metered entry plans; the range was $0.006 to $0.142 (How we calculated).
• Five speech-to-text APIs had a median batch price of $0.003 per minute in September 2026, from $0.0025 for the cheapest to $0.006 for the most expensive (How we calculated).
• Human transcription at Rev costs $1.99 per minute in 2026, about 800 times the cheapest API price we found (Rev pricing).
• Otter's free plan gives 300 transcription minutes a month in 2026, with a 30-minute limit per conversation and 3 lifetime file imports (Otter pricing).
• 6 of 18 transcription apps capped a single free recording in September 2026, from 3 minutes at Notta to 2 hours at Fireflies (Notta pricing, How we calculated).
• MeetWave's audio to text converter cost $0.002 to $0.005 per minute on pay-as-you-go credits in September 2026, and MeetWave Pro $0.0067 per included minute on monthly billing; neither is in the medians (What MeetWave charges).

Price per minute: apps, APIs and people

The same minute of audio costs $0.003 through a median API, $0.033 in the median app and $1.99 from a person. Apps are priced as monthly plans, so we divide the plan price by the minutes it includes; APIs and human services publish a per-minute or per-hour rate (How we calculated). Figure 1 puts the three medians side by side, with MeetWave's own price next to them.

Source: vendors' pricing pages, accessed 2026-09-23; medians computed as described in How we calculated.

Figure 1. One minute of audio costs $0.003 via the median API, $0.033 in the median app and $1.99 from a person; MeetWave credits, not in the medians, cost $0.002 to $0.005. Source: MeetWave check of 23 vendor pricing pages and of meetwave.io/pricing, 2026-09-23.

An app price per included minute is a floor. A plan used at half its quota costs twice as much per minute, and the apps with unlimited plans have no per-minute price at all (How we calculated).

Price is one axis of the choice. Error rates are measured in how accurate AI transcription is on real meetings, and the recording model, bot or no bot, in how to choose transcription software. A caption file a service already exported can be turned into plain text with the free VTT to TXT converter.

The full table: 23 services checked on 2026-09-23

The table is the answer for one service at a time. Each name links to the pricing page we read; prices are per user per month in the currency the page showed, and a dash in the price column means we did not see that billing option on the page (Otter pricing).

Source: vendors' pricing pages, accessed 2026-09-23; the MeetWave row is read from our own plan configuration. For API rows the "$ per included minute" column is the list price per minute. Method: How we calculated.

What "free" means on each plan

Free plans limit five different things, and the monthly minute count is only one of them. Among the five apps that meter free minutes, the allowance runs from 45 minutes a month at Rev to 300 at Otter, with a median of 120 (Rev pricing, Otter pricing). Figure 2 shows the five.

Figure 2. Free transcription plans give 45 to 300 minutes a month. Fireflies, Fathom and tl;dv set no monthly minute cap; 6 of 18 apps limit one free recording. Source: MeetWave check of vendor pricing pages, 2026-09-23.

• Minutes per month. 45 to 300, median 120, across Rev, Descript, Notta, MeetGeek and Otter (How we calculated).
• Length of one recording. 6 of 18 apps stop a free recording: Notta at 3 minutes, Otter, Jamie and TurboScribe at 30, Happy Scribe at 45 and Fireflies at 2 hours (Notta pricing, TurboScribe pricing, Fireflies pricing).
• Files per day. TurboScribe counts files instead of minutes: 3 free transcriptions a day, one upload at a time (TurboScribe pricing).
• File imports. Otter allows 3 imports for the lifetime of a free account; Notta allows 50 uploads a month (Otter pricing, Notta pricing).
• Trial minutes instead of a plan. Sonix gives a 30-minute trial and Happy Scribe a 10-minute trial of AI transcription (Sonix pricing, Happy Scribe pricing).

A limit that does not renew every month is a trial, not a free plan. Three meeting apps, Fireflies, Fathom and tl;dv, advertise unlimited free transcription; Fireflies caps storage at 400 minutes per team instead (Fireflies pricing, Fathom pricing, tl;dv pricing). To transcribe one file without an account, our free audio to text converter takes the first 30 minutes of a recording and returns the transcript with speaker labels.

"Unlimited" plans and where the limit moves

6 of the 10 meeting apps sell an entry paid plan without a minute cap: Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv, Tactiq, Granola and Krisp. Otter, Notta, MeetGeek and Jamie meter theirs (Tactiq pricing, Krisp pricing, How we calculated).

On unlimited plans the limit moves to the length of one recording and to AI credits. Fireflies records up to 2 hours on Free and Pro, 3 hours on Business and 4 on Enterprise, with 20 to 50 AI credits by plan (Fireflies pricing). Otter Pro stops at 90 minutes a meeting, and Notta Pro at 5 hours a recording (Otter pricing, Notta pricing). Among file services, TurboScribe Unlimited, $10 a month billed yearly, takes files of up to 10 hours or 5 GB (TurboScribe pricing).

Why the "$0.10–$0.50 a minute" rule of thumb is out of date

Only 2 of the 8 app prices we checked fall between $0.10 and $0.50 a minute. SpeakWrite's 2026 guide lists automated transcription at "$0.10 – $0.50 per minute" (SpeakWrite, 2026). In our check, Happy Scribe Basic ($0.1417) and Sonix pay-as-you-go ($10 an hour, $0.1667 a minute) sit in that band; the other six monthly plans are below $0.10 (How we calculated).

Annual billing cuts the price further. The discount against monthly billing runs from 15% at Rev to 51% at Otter, and the median annual price per included minute drops to $0.0069 (Rev pricing, Otter pricing).

What MeetWave charges

MeetWave, the publisher of this comparison, sells transcription two ways, and neither is counted in the medians above. The audio to text converter charges one credit per started 30 minutes of a file, and credits come in packs of 20 for $3, 50 for $5, 200 for $15 and 500 for $30: $0.005 a minute with the smallest pack and $0.002 with the largest (MeetWave pricing, How we calculated). Those are floors, because a partly used half hour costs a whole credit, and the first 30 minutes of one file are free without an account (audio to text converter).

The meeting app is priced by plan. Pro costs $16 a month, or $11 a month billed annually, and includes 2,400 minutes of recording analysis: $0.0067 per included minute on monthly billing, against the $0.033 median of the seven apps. The Free plan includes 600 minutes a month with summaries but no transcript view (MeetWave pricing).

How we calculated

We opened each of the 23 pricing pages on 2026-09-23, from a US address, and recorded the entry paid plan, the minutes it includes, the free allowance and the per-recording cap. Pages that switch between monthly and annual billing were read in both positions. The recomputation script is apps/web/scripts/blog-data/transcription-pricing-2026.mjs in our repository; its inputs are the rows of the table above (Rev pricing).

• Price per included minute = monthly plan price ÷ minutes included per month. Example: Otter Pro, $16.99 ÷ 1,200 = $0.0142 (Otter pricing).
• Apps, monthly billing (7): the cheapest plan with a minute quota and a monthly price — Rev Essentials $0.0060, MeetGeek Pro $0.0133, Otter Pro $0.0142, Transkriptor Lite $0.0333, Descript Hobbyist $0.0400, Sonix Core $0.0833, Happy Scribe Basic $0.1417. The median is $0.033 (Transkriptor pricing).
• Apps, annual billing (7): the cheapest plan with a minute quota and an annual price — Transkriptor Pro $0.0035, Notta Pro $0.0045, Rev $0.0051, Otter $0.0069, MeetGeek $0.0083, Descript $0.0267, Happy Scribe $0.0708 (Notta pricing).
• APIs (5): the cheapest pre-recorded (batch) list price — AssemblyAI $0.0025, Azure $0.003, Google Cloud dynamic batch $0.003, Deepgram $0.0043, Amazon $0.006. Google's standard v2 rate is $0.016 a minute (Google Cloud pricing, Azure pricing).
• Ratios: $0.033 ÷ $0.003 = 11; $1.99 ÷ $0.0025 = 796, rounded to about 800 (Deepgram pricing).
• The 18 apps are 10 meeting apps (Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv, Notta, Tactiq, MeetGeek, Jamie, Granola, Krisp) and 8 file transcription services (Rev, Sonix, Descript, Happy Scribe, Transkriptor, Amberscript, Trint, TurboScribe) (Trint plans, TurboScribe pricing).
• MeetWave (not in any median): prices are read from our own pricing page and the credit packs the site sells, on 2026-09-23. A credit covers 30 minutes of audio, so a pack's price per minute is its price ÷ credits ÷ 30: $3 ÷ 20 ÷ 30 = $0.005 and $30 ÷ 500 ÷ 30 = $0.002. Pro: $16 ÷ 2,400 = $0.0067. We leave our own product out of the medians so that the publisher's prices cannot move the survey (MeetWave pricing).

Exclusions. Prices shown only in euros (Jamie, Amberscript) stay out of every median. Plans without a minute quota have no price per minute. OpenAI is not in the table: on 2026-09-23 its API pricing address redirected to a business pricing page without per-model prices, and its developer pricing page answered 403 Forbidden to a regular browser (OpenAI pricing, Amberscript pricing). We re-check every row each quarter; the next check is due 2026-12-23.

What changed since the last check

First check: 2026-09-23. TurboScribe was added the same day, from its pricing page read in a regular browser. Later checks will list every price or limit that moved, with the old and new value (How we calculated).

FAQ

How much does transcription cost per minute?

In September 2026 the median app charged $0.033 per included minute on monthly billing, the median API $0.003 and Rev's human service $1.99 (How we calculated).

How much does AI transcription cost?

On the entry paid plans of seven apps that meter minutes, $0.006 to $0.142 per included minute on monthly billing; on annual billing the median falls to $0.0069 (How we calculated).

What is the cheapest transcription API?

Of the five APIs we checked, AssemblyAI Universal-2 at $0.15 an hour, or $0.0025 a minute, had the lowest list price (AssemblyAI pricing). OpenAI is not in the comparison because its pricing page showed no per-model prices on the day of the check.

How much does MeetWave charge for transcription?

The audio to text converter costs one credit per started 30 minutes, with credits at $0.002 to $0.005 a minute depending on the pack, and the first 30 minutes of one file are free. MeetWave Pro is $16 a month for 2,400 minutes of recording analysis (MeetWave pricing).

How many free minutes does Otter give?

300 transcription minutes a month, up to 30 minutes per conversation and 3 audio or video imports over the life of the account (Otter pricing).

Is the Fireflies free plan unlimited?

Transcription is unlimited on the free plan, but storage is capped at 400 minutes per team, one recording stops at 2 hours and the plan includes 20 AI credits (Fireflies pricing).

How much does human transcription cost per hour?

Rev charges $1.99 a minute, which is $119.40 an hour; Happy Scribe's human proofreading starts at $2.00 a minute (Rev pricing, Happy Scribe pricing).

Sources

1. Otter.ai — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
2. Fireflies.ai — Pricing & Plans (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
3. Fathom — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
4. tl;dv — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
5. Notta — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
6. Tactiq — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
7. MeetGeek — Plans & Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
8. Jamie — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
9. Granola — Pricing plans (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
10. Krisp — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
11. Rev — Subscription Plans + Per-Minute Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
12. Sonix — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
13. Descript — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
14. Happy Scribe — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
15. Transkriptor — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
16. Amberscript — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
17. Trint — Pricing Plans (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
18. TurboScribe — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
19. AssemblyAI — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
20. Deepgram — Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
21. Amazon Web Services — Amazon Transcribe Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
22. Google Cloud — Speech-to-Text API Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
23. Microsoft Azure — Azure Speech Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
24. SpeakWrite — Transcription Costs in 2026: Your Ultimate Pricing Guide (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.
25. OpenAI — API Pricing (2026). Accessed 2026-09-23.