Transcription price per minute
Transcrib Si costs about 0.7 cents a minute on its yearly Pro plan, and that is the number to compare every other service with. The price of transcription is not the monthly price but the price of one minute of audio, and the cheapest of the thirteen services here works out at about 0.25 cents a minute.
Short answer: on a subscription, a minute of transcription costs between a quarter of a cent and a few cents. The cheapest per minute here is AssemblyAI at about 0.25 cents, and the dearest is Sonix pay-as-you-go at about 16.7 cents, which is not a subscription at all but a one-off purchase of machine time. The plan this service publishes sits at about 0.7 cents a minute, and the price per minute here is worked out from the published price and the published allowance, with the working shown in the table.
The table
Thirteen services. Where a service publishes a price per minute directly, that number is in the second column; where it does not, the price per minute is worked out from the plan price and the allowance.
| Service | What they publish | Per minute | The working |
|---|---|---|---|
| AssemblyAI | $0.15 an hour of audio | About 0.25 cents | $0.15 over 60 minutes |
| Transkriptor, Pro yearly | $8.33 a month for 2,400 minutes | About 0.35 cents | $8.33 over 2,400 minutes |
| Notta, Pro yearly | $8.17 a month for 1,800 minutes | About 0.45 cents | $8.17 over 1,800 minutes |
| Rev, Essentials yearly | $25.49 a seat a month for 5,000 minutes | About 0.51 cents | $25.49 over 5,000 minutes |
| Transcrib Si, Pro yearly | $10 a month for 1,500 minutes | About 0.7 cents | $10 over 1,500 minutes |
| Otter, Pro yearly | $8.33 a month for 1,200 minutes | About 0.7 cents | $8.33 over 1,200 minutes |
| Transkriptor, Pro monthly | $19.99 a month for 2,400 minutes | About 0.83 cents | $19.99 over 2,400 minutes |
| Descript, Hobbyist yearly | $16 a month for 600 minutes of media | About 2.7 cents | $16 over 600 minutes |
| Transkriptor, Lite | $9.99 a month for 300 minutes | About 3.3 cents | $9.99 over 300 minutes |
| HappyScribe, Basic | $8.50 a month for 1,440 minutes a year | About 7.1 cents | $8.50 over 120 minutes a month |
| Sonix, Core | $25 a month for 5 hours of transcription | About 8.3 cents | $25 over 300 minutes |
| Transcribe.com, extra server transcription | $5 an hour | About 8.3 cents | $5 over 60 minutes |
| Sonix, pay as you go | $10 an hour of transcription | About 16.7 cents | $10 over 60 minutes |
| HappyScribe, extra credits | $0.20 a minute | $0.20, published | Printed on the pricing page |
| Rev, human transcription | $1.99 a minute | $1.99, published | Printed on the pricing page |
| Fireflies | $0 on the free plan, plans from $10 a seat a month | No per-minute price | The paid plans are unlimited |
| TurboScribe | $0 on the free plan, $10 a month paid yearly | No per-minute price | The paid plan is unlimited |
| MacWhisper | €0 for the free version, €65 for the Pro licence | No per-minute price | One payment, not a subscription |
Three rows in that table have no per-minute price, and the reason is the same each time: the service sells you a right to transcribe without a meter. Fireflies and TurboScribe both put unlimited work behind a subscription, so the price per minute is whatever you make it by how much you send. MacWhisper is not a service at all in this sense, it is software you buy once and run on your own machine, so the comparison stops there.
Two rows are published rather than calculated, and they are worth noticing for opposite reasons. HappyScribe charges $0.20 a minute for credits once the plan runs out, which is a sensible price for a top-up and a reminder of what a minute of transcription is worth on the open market. Rev charges $1.99 a minute for a person to do the work, which is roughly a hundred times the cost of the machine doing it. The gap between those two numbers is the whole difference between a transcript and evidence.
How to read the table
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Published price first
Start from what the service charges and the allowance it comes with. Both numbers are on the pricing page, and both are copied into the table above without adjustment. Where a plan has a yearly price and a monthly price, the yearly one is used, because that is what most people actually pay.
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Then the division
The price per minute is the price divided by the allowance, and the working is written out in the last column so you can check it. A $10 plan that allows 1,500 minutes gives 0.7 cents a minute; a $10 plan that allows 300 minutes gives 3.3 cents. The two plans cost the same and deliver five times less.
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Then the catch
A per-minute price says nothing about what happens when the allowance runs out, whether a file can be long enough for your work, or whether you need a seat per person. Read those three numbers before you read the price.
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Questions this page answers.
How much does a minute of transcription cost?
On a subscription, between about 0.25 cents and about 3.3 cents at the services in this table. The lowest is AssemblyAI at about 0.25 cents a minute, worked out from $0.15 an hour. The plans here sit at about 0.7 cents a minute, from $10 a month for 1,500 minutes. One-off human work is a different order entirely, $1.99 a minute at Rev.
What is the cheapest way to buy an hour of transcription?
Depends on how often you do it. An hour of audio on the yearly plan here costs about $0.40, and the same hour through Sonix pay-as-you-go costs $10 for an hour of machine time. Buy once and pay per use, and the pay-as-you-go model wins. Buy every week and a subscription wins by an order of magnitude, because the subscription has already paid for the machine time whether you use it or not.
Are these prices per minute of my audio or per minute of work?
Mostly per minute of your audio, and the exceptions are marked in the table. Sonix prices the time its own engine spends, so a difficult recording costs more to process than a clean one. That is the one case where the number in this table can move, and it is also the case where you pay for nothing when you are not transcribing.
Why do some services have no price per minute?
Because they sell a right to transcribe without a meter. Fireflies and TurboScribe put unlimited work behind a monthly fee, so the price per minute is only as low as you make it by sending a lot. MacWhisper is software you buy once, so there is no per-minute price to speak of at all. A per-minute number is only meaningful when the service meters the work.
How current are these prices?
Most were read from live pricing pages on 2026-10-25 and the date is written next to each one in the sources below. Two services, Rev and Transkriptor, load their prices with JavaScript and did not render for our reader that day, so their figures come from dated copies in the Internet Archive, and those dates are written next to them as well. Prices in this industry move, so check the pricing page before you sign anything.
Where the numbers on this page come from
Each line names the page the figure was read on and the day it was read.
- Transcrib Si: $10 a month for 1,500 minutes, $0 on the free plan, $0.40 an hour worked out from the same $10, 120 minutes per file, 64 MB per file — https://transcrib.si/pricing.html — checked 2026-10-25
- Otter: $8.33 a month for 1,200 minutes on Pro — https://otter.ai/pricing — checked 2026-10-25
- Notta: $8.17 a month for 1,800 minutes on Pro — https://www.notta.ai/en/pricing — checked 2026-10-25
- Transkriptor: $8.33 a month for 2,400 minutes on Pro paid yearly, $19.99 a month for 2,400 minutes on Pro paid monthly, $9.99 a month for 300 minutes on Lite — http://web.archive.org/web/20260919014640/https://transkriptor.com/pricing/, the copy of the pricing page in the Internet Archive — checked 2026-09-19
- Rev: $25.49 a seat a month for 5,000 minutes on Essentials, $1.99 a minute for human transcription — http://web.archive.org/web/20261004232956/https://www.rev.com/pricing, the copy of the pricing page in the Internet Archive — checked 2026-10-04
- Descript: $16 a month for 600 minutes of media on Hobbyist paid yearly — https://www.descript.com/pricing — checked 2026-10-25
- HappyScribe: $8.50 a month for 1,440 minutes a year on Basic, $0.20 a minute for extra credits — https://www.happyscribe.com/pricing — checked 2026-10-25
- Sonix: $25 a month for 5 hours of transcription on Core, $10 an hour pay as you go — https://sonix.ai/pricing — checked 2026-10-25
- Transcribe.com: $5 an hour for extra server transcription — https://transcribe.com/ — checked 2026-10-21
- AssemblyAI: $0.15 an hour of audio, an hour being 60 minutes — https://assemblyai.com/ — checked 2026-10-21
- Fireflies: $0 on the free plan, plans from $10 a seat a month — https://fireflies.ai/pricing — checked 2026-10-25
- TurboScribe: $0 on the free plan, $10 a month paid yearly — https://turboscribe.ai/pricing — checked 2026-10-25
- MacWhisper: €0 for the free version, €65 for the Pro licence — https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper — checked 2026-10-25
- Price per minute, worked out from the price and the allowance in the table: AssemblyAI about 0.25 cents, Notta about 0.45 cents, Otter about 0.7 cents, Descript Hobbyist yearly about 2.7 cents, HappyScribe Basic about 7.1 cents, Sonix Core about 8.3 cents, Transcribe.com extra server transcription about 8.3 cents, Sonix pay as you go about 16.7 cents, and the yearly Pro plan here about 0.7 cents — calculated from the price and the allowance on the lines above — https://assemblyai.com/, https://www.notta.ai/en/pricing, https://otter.ai/pricing, https://www.descript.com/pricing, https://www.happyscribe.com/pricing, https://sonix.ai/pricing, https://transcribe.com/ and https://transcrib.si/pricing.html — checked 2026-10-25
- Price per minute, worked out from the archived pricing pages: Transkriptor Pro yearly about 0.35 cents, Transkriptor Pro monthly about 0.83 cents, Transkriptor Lite about 3.3 cents, Rev Essentials yearly about 0.51 cents — calculated from the price and the allowance on the lines above — http://web.archive.org/web/20260919014640/https://transkriptor.com/pricing/ and http://web.archive.org/web/20261004232956/https://www.rev.com/pricing — checked 2026-09-19 and 2026-10-04
Where to go next
Free transcription limits
What each service lets you send before you pay.
Sonix alternative
The service that sells hours of transcription time.
HappyScribe alternative
The service that counts minutes a year.
Rev alternative
The service that sells human transcription by the minute.
Descript alternative
The editor that grew out of a transcript.
Transkriptor alternative
The service with 90 free minutes on the free plan.
Also worth a look: plans and prices, the general guide, MP3 to text and the app.
Mark Burmistrov, Founder.
Every number on this page comes from the pricing page, the service contract or the upload form itself. The author of the page and the publisher of the site are the same person. Questions and corrections: support@transcrib.si.