Vapi
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The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free: a recording up to 20 minutes transcribes in full, a longer one is previewed, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export, and credits never expire.
Voice-AI infrastructure: turnkey assistants composed of STT + LLM + TTS providers.
Best for developers building voice agents who want a stack of pluggable STT/LLM/TTS providers behind one API. Pricing: $0.05/min (Vapi orchestration) + provider pass-through.
What it is
Vapi is voice-AI infrastructure: a single API that orchestrates STT, LLM, and TTS providers into a real-time phone or web voice agent. Developers pick the underlying providers (Deepgram, AssemblyAI, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, etc.) per agent. Pricing is a per-minute Vapi orchestration fee plus pass-through provider cost. Best fit: developers building voice agents who want a stack of pluggable stt/llm/tts providers behind one api. Caveats: you pay for vapi orchestration plus each provider; latency depends on chosen pipeline. Pricing as listed: $0.05/min (Vapi orchestration) + provider pass-through. Feature flags from vendor docs: streaming. Directory tags: voice-intel, voice-agent. Last vendor-page check: 2026-05-12.
Watch out for: You pay for Vapi orchestration plus each provider; latency depends on chosen pipeline.
Install / use
What people actually do with Vapi-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 | Yes |
| Languages supported | None |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
Vapi vs Whipscribe
| Feature | Vapi | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Products | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | Not verified | $6–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · first 20 minutes free |
| Speaker identification | Not verified | Named in the summary, key quotes and chapters |
| Word timestamps | Not verified | Yes |
| Streaming | Not verified | No |
| Languages | — | 99 |
| Platforms | API | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to Vapi
Frequently asked about Vapi
How much does Vapi cost?
Vapi is a paid product — published pricing: $0.05/min (Vapi orchestration) + provider pass-through. Pricing changes; verify on the vendor's own page before budgeting.
What platforms does Vapi support?
Vapi is an API — you call it from whatever you build, on any platform with an HTTP client.
How do I get started with Vapi?
Vapi is used through its API: get a key from the vendor, then call it from your own code. There is no desktop app to install.
What are the limitations of Vapi?
You pay for Vapi orchestration plus each provider; latency depends on chosen pipeline.
Who is Vapi best for?
Developers building voice agents who want a stack of pluggable STT/LLM/TTS providers behind one API.
Is Vapi open source?
No. Vapi is a proprietary product. If you need source you can read and run yourself, the open-source tools in this directory are the place to look.
What kind of tool is Vapi?
In this directory Vapi is filed under voice intel, voice agent as a product.
What are the alternatives to Vapi?
There is a side-by-side page at /tools/vapi-ai-alternatives comparing Vapi with the closest tools in the same category on price, platform and features.
Can I automate Vapi-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. $0.012 a minute — about $0.72 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 Vapi?
Vapi is another vendor's product; Whipscribe is a per-minute transcription service. Recordings are transcribed on our own servers and never used for training, and every job returns five formats plus an AI summary, quotes and topics. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export.
What does transcription cost if I use Whipscribe instead of Vapi?
$0.012 a minute — about $0.72 an audio hour — bought as credits that never expire. There is no subscription and no monthly minimum: a 3-hour recording is about $2.16, a thousand-hour archive is about $720 once. The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export, so you can see what your recording holds before paying anything.
Where is the Vapi 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 servers, and an MCP server.
Whipscribe is a hosted transcription 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.
Transcribe your recordings
Using Vapi today? Send your next recording here and compare the transcript. Transcribe any language, any recording · Transcription services from $0.29 an hour · Transcribe from any meeting or recording platform · How to transcribe, step by step
Explore
All transcription tools · By language · By platform · By file format · How-to guides · Transcription services · Transcription API · Pricing
Long recording to get through?
One file up to 10 hours, as an upload or a link: see transcribing a long MP3 or M4A, how to transcribe a podcast and an SRT subtitle file from any recording.
Looking at paid options?
Before you choose a transcription tool or service: see the best transcription services side by side, the cheapest way to transcribe an hour of audio and how our transcription services work.