Zencastr

Partly. Zencastr has a free tier with paid plans above it — published pricing: free / from $20/mo. Free-tier limits change more often than this page does; verify on the vendor's pricing page.

Zencastr runs in the browser, so it works on any desktop OS with a modern browser, and on phones and tablets.

There is nothing to install — Zencastr is used in the browser. Create an account on the vendor's site and upload or connect your audio.

Browser-recording focus; per-month subscription model.

Podcasters who want a polished browser-based recording tool plus AI editing.

No. Zencastr is a proprietary product from Zencastr Inc.. If you need source you can read and run yourself, the open-source tools in this directory are the place to look.

No — Zencastr is browser-only. There is nothing to install and nothing runs on your machine.

Zencastr is made by Zencastr Inc..

In this directory Zencastr is filed under meetings, podcast, recording as a product.

There is a side-by-side page at /tools/zencastr-alternatives comparing Zencastr with the closest tools in the same category on price, platform and features.

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.

Zencastr 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.

$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.

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.