Riverside
Studio-quality remote recording for podcasts and video.
Drop your audio. Transcript in seconds. First transcript free, then $2 a file or $8 = 1,000 min
Best for podcast producers and content creators who want studio-quality remote recordings. Pricing: free / from $19/mo.
What it is
Riverside is a remote-recording platform for podcasts and video shows. The product records each participant locally at studio quality (up to 4K video, uncompressed audio) and uploads the local files after the session for editing — avoiding the compression artifacts that mar live-broadcast captures. Riverside includes AI transcription, AI clip detection, magic editor (text-based editing similar to Descript), and AI-generated show notes. The product is widely used by podcast networks and content creators. Pricing is straightforward monthly tiers. Pricing and product details listed here were last reviewed by Neugence on 2026-05-12; check the vendor site for current values before quoting.
Watch out for: Recording-and-production focus; not a meeting bot.
Install / use
riverside.fm — Free, Standard $19/mo, Pro $29/mo, Business $49/mo, Enterprise contact
What people actually do with Riverside-style transcription
The tool is the means. These are the jobs — each one priced at published rates, each one wired up on its own page.
Features
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | No |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | None |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
Riverside vs Whipscribe
| Feature | Riverside | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Products | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | Not verified | $8–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · $2 single unlock · free instant preview |
| Speaker diarization | Not verified | Yes |
| Word timestamps | Not verified | Yes |
| Streaming | Not verified | No |
| Languages | — | 99 |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android | Web, API, MCP |
Where this category is heading
From the vendor changelogs we track weekly — what changed in August 2026, and what it means if you are choosing now.
AssemblyAI moved summarisation onto an LLM this month; every vendor is racing to return action items, quotes and topics with the text rather than as an add-on.
Whipscribe today Every Whipscribe job already returns an insights payload — summary, key quotes, topics and speakers — from the same job id, at no extra charge.
Deepgram shipped self-hosted container images in August — the market is moving toward audio that stays inside a boundary the customer controls, because teams with customer calls or unreleased material are refusing shared model endpoints.
Whipscribe today Whipscribe runs on our own GPUs in a private, secured cloud. Audio is never forwarded to OpenAI or any third-party model.
The fastest-growing way to use a transcription API is not a form — it is Claude, Cursor or a workflow runner calling it mid-task through MCP.
Whipscribe today Whipscribe ships an MCP server: transcribe, search and summarise from an assistant without wiring anything.
AssemblyAI's 1.0 SDK unified async, realtime and sync; Deepgram's CLI went to 0.3. The unit of work is becoming the folder or the bucket, not the file.
Whipscribe today Submit with an Idempotency-Key and a batch_id, poll by job, retry safely. The S3 connector runs a whole prefix in one grant.
Deepgram added Afrikaans, Georgian and Armenian and improved a dozen more this month. Coverage is widening while quality still clusters around English and the large European languages.
Whipscribe today 99+ languages auto-detected. Ask for a language explicitly when you know it — auto-detect on a short or noisy clip is the most common cause of a wrong-language transcript.
Source: Deepgram and AssemblyAI changelogs, scanned 2026-08-24.
Alternatives to Riverside
Looking for a Riverside alternative? How Whipscribe compares →
Frequently asked about Riverside
Is Riverside free?
Partly. Riverside has a free tier with paid plans above it — published pricing: free / from $19/mo. Free-tier limits change more often than this page does; verify on the vendor's pricing page.
Does Riverside work on Mac, Windows and Linux?
Riverside runs on Web, iOS and Android.
How do I get started with Riverside?
There is nothing to install — Riverside is used in the browser. Create an account on the vendor's site and upload or connect your audio.
What are the limitations of Riverside?
Recording-and-production focus; not a meeting bot.
Who is Riverside best for?
Podcast producers and content creators who want studio-quality remote recordings.
Is Riverside open source?
No. Riverside is a proprietary product from Riverside.fm Inc.. If you need source you can read and run yourself, the open-source tools in this directory are the place to look.
Who makes Riverside?
Riverside is made by Riverside.fm Inc..
What kind of tool is Riverside?
In this directory Riverside is filed under meetings, podcast, recording as a product.
What are the alternatives to Riverside?
There is a side-by-side page at /tools/riverside-fm-alternatives comparing Riverside with the closest tools in the same category on price, platform and features.
Can I automate Riverside-style transcription without running it myself?
Yes. If what you want is transcripts rather than the tool itself, Whipscribe does the same job as a hosted API: submit a file or URL, poll a job id, pull the result as txt, json, srt, vtt or docx. $0.008 a minute — about $0.48 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. The automation recipes on this site show it wired to Drive folders, Zoom recordings, S3 buckets and no-code platforms.
How is Whipscribe different from Riverside?
Riverside is another vendor's product; Whipscribe is a per-minute transcription service. We run the models on our own GPUs in a private cloud — audio is never forwarded to OpenAI or any third-party model — and every job returns five formats plus an AI summary, quotes and topics. Your first transcript in the web app is free at any length, no card.
What does transcription cost if I use Whipscribe instead of Riverside?
$0.008 a minute — about $0.48 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. There is no subscription and no monthly minimum: a 3-hour recording is about $1.44, a thousand-hour archive is about $480 once. Your first transcript in the web app is free at any length, no card, so you can check accuracy on your own audio before paying anything.
Where is the Riverside category heading?
Three things are moving across the whole speech-to-text market right now: summaries, action items and speaker insights generated on top of the transcript rather than sold separately; private, secured deployment where the audio never leaves a boundary you control; and agent access — transcription exposed as a tool that Claude, Cursor or a workflow runner can call directly. Whipscribe ships all three today: per-job insights, our own GPUs, and an MCP server.
Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.
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