Human transcription is still the right call when a word error costs something real — legal proceedings, clinical records, broadcast captions, four-plus speakers, heavy accents. Ten providers, per-minute pricing, turnaround tiers, and specialty areas — every number cited with a primary source. Six providers' prices re-read on 26 Oct 2026; the rest carry the date they were last checked.
Short answer. Human transcription services charge $0.79 to $2.50 per audio minute on their own price pages, which is $47 to $150 per audio hour, and return the transcript in 12 hours to 10 business days. The cheapest published starting rates are TranscribeMe ($0.79), Scribie ($0.80) and GoTranscript ($1.02); Rev is $1.99 with delivery in 12 hours or less. Pay for a person when a wrong word costs money or evidence; for everything else an AI transcript you check yourself costs $0.29 to $0.48 an hour.
Not every recording needs a person. If a machine transcript you check yourself will do, WhipScribe's transcription service costs $4 for 500 minutes, $12 for 2,000 or $24 for 5,000, with no subscription and credits that never expire.
The matrix
Scroll horizontally on mobile. Prices and turnaround tiers are quoted from each provider's public pricing page. Rev, Scribie, GoTranscript, TranscribeMe, CastingWords and Daily Transcription were re-read on 26 Oct 2026 and Verbit on 26 Oct 2026; Focus Forward, Ditto and 3Play were last checked on 2026-04-23. Where a provider publishes no rate card, the cell reads "Contact sales" — not a guess.
| Provider | Human price (per audio min) | Turnaround tiers | Accuracy claim | Verbatim | Specialty | Languages | Site |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revcategory leader | $1.99/min | 12 hours or less | 99%+ accuracy | Add-on timestamps; verbatim not separately priced on services page | General, legal, court reporting | English primary | rev.com/services |
| Scribieself-serve indie | From $0.80/min | Priority Processing at +$1.25/min (2× faster) | 99% general; 99.9% guaranteed on Precision Verbatim | Precision Verbatim +$0.50/min | General; legal at $1.30/min with formatting; HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 Type 2 | Not specified on site | scribie.com |
| GoTranscriptlong-tail high accuracy | From $1.02/min | Standard (e.g. 5 days) → rush 6-12h | 99.4% (Precisa QMS verified) | Clean Verbatim + Full Verbatim tiers | General, translation | 140+ languages | gotranscript.com |
| TranscribeMetranscriber marketplace | From $0.79/min | Human Edited ~1 business day; 2-3 days with extras such as timestamps | 95-98% expected; 99%+ on Verbatim / Extra Review | Dedicated Verbatim tier, 2-5 day TAT | HIPAA, legal, medical, AI/ML training | English, Spanish, French, German, Korean, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Russian, Mandarin | transcribeme.com |
| CastingWordsniche long-form | $1.00 / $1.50 / $2.50 per min | Budget (no time stated) · Professional 1 week · Expert 1 day | No percentage stated; free re-edit on request | Not specified on public pricing page | General, caption outputs (SRT/VTT/DFXP) | Not specified on site | castingwords.com |
| Focus Forwardmarket research | Contact sales | 24-48h professional, AI instant | "Best in class" (no percent published) | Not specified on services page | Qualitative & quantitative market research, field teams | 100+ supported languages (translation) | focusfwd.com |
| Ditto Transcriptslegal · medical | Calculator-based; verbatim +$0.25/min | Rush 1-2 bd · Standard 3-5 bd · Extended 6-10 bd | Certified, human-reviewed | +$0.25/min (verbatim); Notary $150 flat | Law enforcement, legal, medical, academic (CJIS + HIPAA) | Not specified on pricing page | dittotranscripts.com |
| Verbitenterprise · education | Contact sales (no prices on verbit.ai/plans, 26 Oct 2026) | Live captions + pre-recorded (tiers not published) | Not published as percent on pricing page | Not broken out on pricing page | Legal, education (ADA Title II, Section 508, GSA, WCAG), media captioning | 50+ languages (translation) | verbit.ai/plans |
| 3Play Mediaaccessibility · captioning | Contact sales | NBC Olympics case study: 2-hour delivery with expert human review | 99%+ accurate captioning | Not broken out on home page | Video accessibility, captioning, subtitling, dubbing (ADA, 504/508, CVAA, WCAG, EAA, ACA) | Not specified on home page | 3playmedia.com |
| Daily Transcriptionentertainment / A/V | $1.10 / $1.35 / $1.75 per min (1-20 h); from $0.95 at 151+ h | 5-day · 3-day · 1-day | 99% accuracy (all tiers) | Strict Verbatim +$0.50/min | Film, TV, internet, radio post-production; subtitling at $9/min; scripts $5/min | 80+ Global Languages (translation) | dailytranscription.com/pricing |
Pricing re-read on each provider's own page on 2026-10-26 (Focus Forward, Ditto, 3Play: 2026-04-23). Brand names are their owners'; WhipScribe is not affiliated with any provider listed. Where a provider publishes no numeric rate card (Focus Forward, 3Play), the cell reads "Contact sales" — we do not guess. If a claim on this page disagrees with a provider's current page, email contact@whipscribe.com.
Lowest → highest published per-minute human rate. Contact-sales providers omitted from bar chart; shown as dotted line at the right. Rates as of 2026-10-26 (Focus Forward, Ditto, 3Play: 2026-04-23).
Typical end-to-end path across the ten providers — upload, queue, transcribe, review, deliver. Rush tiers compress the "transcribe" and "review" stages; verbatim tiers add a QA pass.
Filled cell = provider markets this specialty on their public site as of 2026-04-23. Empty = not advertised (does not mean the provider cannot do it — ask their sales team).
What it costs
The same published starting rates, multiplied out to an hour and to a 10-hour project. Rates as read on each provider's own page on 26 Oct 2026; rush, verbatim, noisy-audio and timestamp add-ons cost more.
| Service | Published rate | 1 audio hour | 10 audio hours | Turnaround at that rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TranscribeMe | from $0.79/min | $47.40 | $474 | about 1 business day |
| Scribie | from $0.80/min | $48.00 | $480 | not stated; priority +$1.25/min |
| CastingWords Budget | $1.00/min | $60.00 | $600 | not stated |
| GoTranscript | from $1.02/min | $61.20 | $612 | standard, e.g. 5 days |
| Daily Transcription, 5-day | $1.10/min | $66.00 | $660 | 5 days |
| Rev | $1.99/min | $119.40 | $1,194 | 12 hours or less |
| CastingWords Expert | $2.50/min | $150.00 | $1,500 | 1 day |
| WhipScribe (AI, no human) | $4 for 500 min · $12 for 2,000 · $24 for 5,000 | $0.29 to $0.48 | $12 (600 minutes of a 2,000-minute pack) | median 3 minutes for a 1-2 hour file |
Sources, read 26 Oct 2026: transcribeme.com/pricing · scribie.com · castingwords.com · gotranscript.com/transcription-services · dailytranscription.com/pricing · rev.com/pricing. WhipScribe: /pricing; turnaround from our production record (30 days to 27 Oct 2026). Pack credits never expire.
Choosing one
Look for a written guarantee on the tier you buy, not a headline. Scribie guarantees 99.9% only on Precision Verbatim; TranscribeMe guarantees 99%+ on Verbatim; Rev states 99%+ and its FAQ calls it guaranteed. Daily Transcription's 99% applies only to clean audio.
Rev returns human transcripts in 12 hours or less at its one rate. Elsewhere speed is an add-on: Scribie's priority processing adds $1.25 a minute, Daily Transcription's 1-day tier is $1.75 against $1.10 for 5 days, CastingWords' 1-day Expert tier is $2.50 against $1.50 for a week.
Volume discounts are published by few. Daily Transcription drops from $1.10 to $0.95 a minute past 151 hours; GoTranscript lists bulk tiers from 2,500 minutes; Rev takes up to 15% off on a subscription. Ask for the rate in writing before a large batch.
Legal and court work needs a certified-transcript process; medical needs HIPAA; broadcast captions need ADA, CVAA or WCAG compliance. The matrix above shows who markets which; confirm with the provider before you send files.
Clean verbatim drops ums and false starts; full or strict verbatim keeps them, which research and legal work often need. Strict verbatim costs extra: +$0.50 a minute at Scribie and at Daily Transcription.
For a recording you only need to search or quote from, an AI transcript costs a fraction of a human one. Read it, mark the minutes that matter, and buy human review only for those. WhipScribe is AI only: it does not employ transcribers.
Pick the right tool
Every job has one right answer. A human transcriptionist is worth 5-15× the cost for accuracy-critical work. AI is cheaper and faster for most other work. Pick by job, not by habit.
Budget: $0.79-$1.99/min ($48-$120 per audio hour). Turnaround: 12 hours (rush) to 10 business days. If the deadline is today and a person need not check every word, compare same-day transcription with no rush fee.
Whipscribe: packs from $4 for 500 minutes · free preview of the opening minutes · no signup · AI-first, transcribed on our own servers.
Sending recordings out every week rather than hiring one person? See outsourcing a steady stream of recordings for what recurring volume costs with us.
By field
Dedicated provider pages by field are in progress at /fields/<slug>. Until those ship, here is the short answer for each specialty.
Rev (general legal + court), Ditto (CJIS + HIPAA, certified transcripts), Verbit (courtroom + ADA Title II), TranscribeMe (legal workflow with per-page pricing option).
Rev, TranscribeMe and GoTranscript legal rates, checked 4 October 2026, are compared on legal transcription services.
TranscribeMe (HIPAA-compliant, pre-registration required), Ditto Transcripts (HIPAA-compliant medical specialty), Scribie (HIPAA + SOC 2 Type 2). Verify each provider's BAA availability before uploading PHI.
Deep-dive at /fields/medical-transcription (coming soon).
Focus Forward (market-research specialty, 24-48h professional turnaround), TranscribeMe (AI/ML data workflow), Rev (standard human tier for grad-student interviews). Verbatim tier strongly recommended for ethnographic work. For a machine option priced against Focus Forward, see the Focus Forward alternative.
Deep-dive at /fields/academic-transcription (coming soon).
CastingWords (caption outputs SRT/VTT/DFXP), Daily Transcription (film/TV post-production pedigree), GoTranscript (140+ languages for international shows), Rev (fast turnaround for weekly shows). Most podcasters do better starting with AI and escalating only flagged minutes.
Deep-dive at /fields/podcast-transcription (coming soon).
Rev (general court work), Ditto Transcripts (CJIS-compliant law-enforcement + depositions, notary +$150), Verbit (courtroom technology platform). For certified court-of-record transcripts, confirm each provider's certified-reporter process directly.
Deep-dive at /fields/court-reporting (coming soon).
3Play Media (ADA, 504/508, CVAA, WCAG, EAA, ACA compliance; 99%+ accuracy), Verbit (ADA Title II education platform, Section 508 and WCAG), CastingWords (SRT/VTT/DFXP caption outputs). All three publish compliance posture publicly.
Deep-dive at /fields/captioning-accessibility (coming soon).
Questions people ask first
On the providers' own price pages (26 Oct 2026): from $0.79 a minute at TranscribeMe, $0.80 at Scribie, $1.00 at CastingWords Budget, $1.02 at GoTranscript, $1.10 at Daily Transcription for 5-day delivery and $1.99 at Rev. That is $47 to $150 per audio hour before rush, verbatim or difficult-audio add-ons. A 10-hour project runs from about $474 to $1,500.
A person listens to the recording and types it, usually after a machine first pass, and a reviewer checks it on the higher tiers. You pay per audio minute and wait hours to days. The alternative is AI transcription, where software writes the whole transcript in minutes and you review it yourself.
It depends on the job. For speed at one price, Rev (12 hours or less, $1.99/min). For the lowest published starting rate, TranscribeMe ($0.79) or Scribie ($0.80). For film and TV post-production, Daily Transcription. For legal and law-enforcement work, Ditto Transcripts. For broadcast captioning and accessibility, 3Play Media or Verbit. This page has no affiliate links and takes no payment from any provider.
They are when a word error costs something real — legal proceedings, clinical documentation, broadcast compliance, four-plus speakers, or strong accents. A human transcriber's 99%+ verbatim fidelity is the difference between an admissible exhibit and an unusable one. For podcasts, internal meetings, research notes you will edit anyway, and sequential-speaker interviews, modern AI (including Whipscribe, with one-time credit packs from $4 for 500 minutes) is accurate enough and roughly 100 to 500 times cheaper per audio hour ($0.29 to $0.48 an hour against $47 to $150).
Premium human services advertise 99%+ accuracy with verbatim review — TranscribeMe's Verbatim tier claims 99%+ per transcribeme.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-26); Rev's human tier claims 99%+ per rev.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-26); GoTranscript claims 99.4% per gotranscript.com/transcription-services (checked 2026-10-26). On our own benchmark, about 7 words in 100 differed from the reference on clean English read speech; on noisy, multi-speaker, or accented audio, the human-AI gap widens substantially.
Rev advertises 12 hours or less at $1.99/min per rev.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-26). TranscribeMe delivers Human Edited in about 1 business day per transcribeme.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-26). Daily Transcription offers a 1-day tier at $1.75/min versus a 5-day tier at $1.10/min for 1-20 hours per dailytranscription.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-26). Rush adds roughly 40 to 150% to the base rate: Scribie +$1.25/min, Daily Transcription $1.75 against $1.10. Same-day or sub-12-hour delivery always costs a premium.
Yes, and most people should. Transcribe the audio with AI first for triage — read the AI transcript, mark the minutes that matter, then send only those segments to a human for verification. A one-hour interview where only 12 minutes are quotable becomes 60 minutes of AI transcription + $18 of human review on a $1.50/min service, instead of $90 of human transcription end-to-end. On Whipscribe that AI-first hour uses 60 of the 500 minutes in a $4 pack.
Rev, TranscribeMe, Scribie, GoTranscript, Ditto Transcripts, and Daily Transcription all offer verbatim tiers. Ditto explicitly markets CJIS + HIPAA compliance per dittotranscripts.com/pricing (checked 2026-04-23). Verbit targets courtroom and legal work; its plans page shows no prices, only Book a demo or Contact sales (verbit.ai/plans, checked 2026-10-26). Daily Transcription adds Strict Verbatim at +$0.50/min per dailytranscription.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-26). For court-of-record work, confirm the certified-transcript process with the provider before sending files.
No. Whipscribe is AI-first — one-time credit packs from $4 for 500 minutes, with a free preview of the opening minutes. When AI is not right for your job, this page directs you honestly to the human providers who specialize in that work. When AI is right and the audio is clean, WhipScribe costs $0.29 to $0.48 an audio hour against $47 to $150 for a human service, and returns transcripts in minutes instead of hours or days.
Try the AI path first: every recording starts with a free preview of its opening minutes, with no signup. When a job is worth $90/hour of human review, the ten providers above are the right place to go.
Try WhipScribe AI first: free previewIf you are deciding who transcribes your recordings: see our transcription service with prices and turnaround.