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Cheap transcription services: what an hour of audio really costs

WhipScribe transcribes audio and video for $0.29 to $0.48 per audio hour: packs start at $4 for 500 minutes and the minutes never expire. It is AI transcription, and it takes about 2 minutes per hour of audio; most files finish in under a minute.

• From $4 · 500 minutes
• Credits never expire
• No seat fee
• 99+ languages

Drop a file or paste a link. The summary is free to read; a pack opens the full transcript.

What it costs, per pack and per hour

We sell minutes in packs. You pay once, the minutes stay in your account until you use them, and there is no subscription to cancel. The price per hour below is simply the pack price divided by the hours of audio it covers.

Prices in US dollars, as on our pricing page. Workspace's per-hour figure assumes the full 700 hours; at 40 hours a month it works out to about $0.48 an hour.

Two things keep the bill small beyond the headline rate. Minutes never expire, so a pack bought for one project still works for the next one a year later. And there is no seat fee: one balance covers whoever uploads, so a small team does not pay per person to share it.

Turnaround

Processing takes about 2 minutes per hour of audio, and most files finish in under a minute. A one-hour interview is usually ready before you have refilled your coffee. Nobody is waiting in a queue for a person to become free, which is the main reason machine transcription is both cheap and fast.

One file can be up to 10 hours long or 5 GB. You can upload any audio or video file (MP3, MP4, M4A, WAV, FLAC, OGG, WEBM, MOV and more) or paste a link: YouTube, a podcast or RSS feed, Google Drive, Twitch or Kick.

What you get for the price

• A timestamped transcript you can read, search and correct in the browser.
• Exports in five formats: TXT, DOCX, SRT, VTT and JSON, so the same transcript serves as a document, as subtitles, or as data.
• A summary of the recording, with chapters and timestamps, the names, numbers and dates that were said, the questions the recording answers, and a chat over the transcript.
• 99+ languages, detected automatically. You do not need to pick one before uploading.
• Privacy. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and are never used for training. Delete a recording and its transcript at any time.

The cheap part is honest about one thing: the summary of any recording is free to read, so you can see that we understood your audio before paying anything. The full transcript opens with a pack from $4.

See a finished transcript first

These are public recordings, transcribed the same way your file would be:

• Pride and Prejudice, a LibriVox audiobook reading in English.
• Candide, a French reading, to see another language.
• LINUX Unplugged 661, a podcast episode with several hosts talking over each other.
• A Scandal in Bohemia, an hour-long public-domain audiobook with its summary and chapters.
• More public transcripts: talks, podcasts and audiobooks, grouped by topic and language.

How the price compares with Rev, Otter and Descript

Cheap depends on how much you transcribe and how often. A monthly plan that is expensive for one interview can be good value if you use every minute it includes. So the table below takes three real workloads for one month and prices each from the providers' own pricing pages, checked 3 October 2026, at their monthly billing rate.

Competitor figures are monthly-billing list prices for one person from each provider's own pricing page, checked 3 October 2026; annual billing is lower (see below). A month of a subscription renews; a WhipScribe pack does not.

Rev

Rev sells two different things. Its AI plans are per seat: Essentials is $29.99 per seat a month, or $25.49 a month billed annually ($305.90 a year), with 5,000 AI transcription and caption minutes per user a month. Pro is $59.99 per seat a month, or $47.99 a month billed annually, with 10,000 minutes. Its free plan lists 45 AI minutes a month, so a one-hour recording does not fit. Separately, human transcription is $1.99 a minute, delivered in 12 hours or less.

Where Rev wins: if you really transcribe 80 hours a month, Essentials comes to about $0.36 an hour, the same as our $12 pack. And Rev offers human transcription, legal formats and human captions, which we do not. See Rev pricing explained for the details.

Otter

Otter Pro is $16.99 per user a month, or $8.33 a month billed annually, with 1,200 minutes a month, conversations up to 90 minutes and 10 audio or video file imports a month. Business is $30 per user a month, or $19.99 billed annually, with unlimited file imports and meetings up to 4 hours. The free Basic plan lists 300 minutes a month, 30 minutes per conversation and 3 file imports for the lifetime of the account.

Where Otter wins: it is built for meetings. It joins calls and records them as they happen, which we do not do. If most of your audio is live meetings, it may suit you better. If you mostly upload finished files, the import limits matter more than the minutes. More in Otter pricing explained.

Descript

Descript is an audio and video editor that transcribes as part of editing. Hobbyist is $24 a month, or $16 a month billed annually, with 10 media hours a month. Creator is $35 a month, or $24 billed annually, with 30 media hours. Business is $65 a month, or $50 billed annually, with 40 media hours. The free plan includes 60 minutes of media a month.

Where Descript wins: if you edit podcasts or videos by editing the text, the transcript is part of a tool you would pay for anyway. And for exactly one hour a month, its free plan can cost nothing. If all you need is the transcript, you are paying for an editor you will not use. More in Descript pricing explained.

When to choose a human service instead

A cheap AI service is the right tool for most interviews, lectures, meetings, podcasts and archives: transcribe everything, then check the passages you will quote or rely on. The timestamps make that check quick. Pay for a human service, at around $119 an hour on Rev's list price, when:

• the transcript will be filed with a court, or must be certified;
• it must be strictly verbatim, with every filler word and false start kept;
• each speaker has to be named in the transcript;
• the recording is so noisy, distant or crosstalk-heavy that you would re-listen to most of it anyway.

For those jobs the human price is fair, because a person checks every line. Our directory of human transcription services lists published rates. For everything else, the difference between $119 and under $0.50 an hour is hard to justify.

How to spend the least

1. Read the free summary first. It shows whether the audio was understood before you spend anything.
2. Buy the pack that matches the year, not the week. Minutes never expire, so the $12 or $24 pack lowers the hourly rate without the risk of losing what you do not use.
3. Paste links instead of downloading. YouTube, podcast, Drive and other links go straight in; there is nothing to convert first.
4. Move to Workspace only when you transcribe every day. At $19 a month it beats the packs once you use more than about 40 hours a month on the smaller packs, or about 65 hours on the $24 pack.

Questions people ask before paying

Other transcription services pages

• Transcription services: AI, human and do-it-yourself compared.
• Best transcription services: which one wins for which job.
• Audio transcription services
• Video transcription services
• Online transcription service
• WhipScribe pricing