Audio → transcription APIs
What does 1 hour of transcription cost?
23 speech-to-text APIs from 12 providers. Recorded audio starts at $0.027 per hour (Whisper, Cloudflare Workers AI). Set your hours, language and speaker labels below.
- Cheapest overall$2.70 / 100 hWhisper · Cloudflare Workers AI
- With speaker labels$12.00 / 100 hMelia 1 · Speechmatics
- Most accurate (English)$22.00 / 100 hScribe v2 · ElevenLabs · 5.8% WER
Prices from each provider's official pricing page, checked Oct 31, 2026. API usage, not app subscriptions. How we compare.
Ranked for your volume
Transcription monthly cost by provider
Costs update as you type.
Equal-sized requests; one audio channel.
Whisper at Cloudflare Workers AI
22 priced options · No language requirement · base transcription
22 options with a full price · 1 more needs a closer look (below)
| Workflow / evidence | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WhisperCloudflare Workers AILowest estimate | $2.70 | Not benchmarked | $0.027base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notesWorkers AI duration estimate; free allocation and account charges are not deducted. Price snapshot: 2026-10-31. Tracked dataset. Official pricing ↗ · Feature evidence ↗ |
| Whisper Large v3 TurboCloudflare Workers AI | $3.06 | 7.8%English average · lower is better | $0.031base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notesWorkers AI duration estimate; dataset rounds the provider's per-minute rate. Free allocation is not deducted. Price snapshot: 2026-10-31. Tracked dataset. Official pricing ↗ · Feature evidence ↗Accuracy: Open ASR Leaderboard result for |
| Whisper Large v3 TurboGroq | $4.00 | 7.8%English average · lower is better | $0.04base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notes10-second minimum billed duration per request. Price snapshot: 2026-10-31. Tracked dataset. Official pricing ↗ · Feature evidence ↗Accuracy: Open ASR Leaderboard result for |
| Grok Speech to TextxAI | $10.00 | Not benchmarked | $0.10base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notesREST (file) rate; streaming costs more and is not included here. Price snapshot: 2026-10-31. Tracked dataset. Official pricing ↗ |
| Whisper Large v3Groq | $11.10 | 7.4%English average · lower is better | $0.111base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notes10-second minimum billed duration per request. Price snapshot: 2026-10-31. Tracked dataset. Official pricing ↗ · Feature evidence ↗Accuracy: Open ASR Leaderboard result for |
| Melia 1Speechmatics | $12.00 | Not benchmarked | $0.12base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notesPre-recorded pay-as-you-go rate. Multilingual model; speaker diarization included. Price snapshot: 2026-10-17. Sourced preview; confirm the provider quote. Official pricing ↗ · Feature evidence ↗ |
| Universal-2AssemblyAI | $15.00 | Not benchmarked | $0.15base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notesPay-as-you-go pre-recorded rate per hour of audio submitted. Speaker labels +$0.02/hr. Price snapshot: 2026-10-17. Sourced preview; confirm the provider quote. Official pricing ↗ · Feature evidence ↗ |
| Azure Speech batch transcriptionMicrosoft Azure | $18.00 | Not benchmarked | $0.18base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notesStandard batch rate, billed per second. Real-time transcription costs $1 per hour. Price snapshot: 2026-10-17. Sourced preview; confirm the provider quote. Official pricing ↗ · Feature evidence ↗ |
| Speech-to-Text V2 dynamic batchGoogle Cloud | $18.00 | Not benchmarked | $0.18base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notesDynamic batch recognition for standard models: much cheaper, results are not immediate. Check the latency terms. Price snapshot: 2026-10-17. Sourced preview; confirm the provider quote. Official pricing ↗ · Feature evidence ↗ |
| GPT-4o mini TranscribeOpenAI | $18.00 | Not benchmarked | $0.18base rate | Recorded filesSources & billing notesBilled in audio and text tokens; OpenAI's own estimate is $0.003 per minute. Files up to 25 MB. Price snapshot: 2026-10-17. Sourced preview; confirm the provider quote. Official pricing ↗ · Feature evidence ↗ |
Price not fully listed 1
These match your requirements, but the base price or the speaker-label charge is not published in a form we can calculate.
Accuracy is the word error rate (WER) the open Open ASR Leaderboard measured for the exact same model (English average, or FLEURS for the selected language); it is not a test of your audio, and rows without an exact match say so. Costs are API usage estimates, not all-in account bills. Includes documented request minimums and known speaker-label charges when required. Excludes taxes, plan fees, credits, retries, storage and other extras. Incomplete language evidence is kept out of a confirmed shortlist. Test representative audio before integrating.
Check the numbers
Every rate and its source
These are transcription APIs for developers, not subscriptions to meeting assistants or consumer apps. Lower cost does not establish better recognition accuracy or support for your language.
Show all 23 base rates with sources
| Model / provider | Per audio minute | Per audio hour | Source checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Whisper Cloudflare Workers AI Official price and billing notes | $0.00045 | $0.027 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Whisper Large v3 Turbo Cloudflare Workers AI Official price and billing notes | $0.00051 | $0.031 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Whisper Large v3 Turbo Groq Official price and billing notes | $0.00067 | $0.04 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Grok Speech to Text xAI Official price and billing notes | $0.00167 | $0.10 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Whisper Large v3 Groq Official price and billing notes | $0.00185 | $0.111 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Voxtral Mini Transcribe 2 Mistral AI Official price and billing notes | $0.003 | $0.18 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Scribe v2 ElevenLabs Official price and billing notes | $0.00367 | $0.22 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Nova-3 (monolingual rate) Deepgram Official price and billing notes | $0.0043 | $0.258 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Amazon Transcribe (batch) Amazon Transcribe Official price and billing notes | $0.006 | $0.36 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime Mistral AI Official price and billing notes | $0.006 | $0.36 | Oct 31, 2026 Daily tracking |
| Whisper OpenAI Official price and billing notes | $0.006 | $0.36 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| GPT Transcribe OpenAI Official price and billing notes | $0.0045 | $0.27 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| GPT-4o Transcribe OpenAI Official price and billing notes | $0.006 | $0.36 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| GPT-4o mini Transcribe OpenAI Official price and billing notes | $0.003 | $0.18 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize OpenAI Official price and billing notes | $0.006 | $0.36 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| Universal-3.5 Pro AssemblyAI Official price and billing notes | $0.0035 | $0.21 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| Universal-2 AssemblyAI Official price and billing notes | $0.0025 | $0.15 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| Chirp 3 (Speech-to-Text V2) Google Cloud Official price and billing notes | $0.016 | $0.96 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| Speech-to-Text V2 dynamic batch Google Cloud Official price and billing notes | $0.003 | $0.18 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| Azure Speech batch transcription Microsoft Azure Official price and billing notes | $0.003 | $0.18 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| Melia 1 Speechmatics Official price and billing notes | $0.002 | $0.12 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| Standard Speechmatics Official price and billing notes | $0.00383 | $0.23 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
| Enhanced Speechmatics Official price and billing notes | $0.00633 | $0.38 | Oct 17, 2026 Official page check |
Rates come from the approved open pricing datasets where they match the provider page, otherwise from the provider's official pricing page. Totals are estimates, not quotes. Recorded and live endpoints are kept separate. Deepgram uses the monolingual pre-recorded rate; premium tiers and audio-token pricing are not converted into flat hourly rates.
One workflow, more cost clarity