What Video Transcription Actually Costs in 2026

Transcription pricing is unusually hard to compare because the industry bills in at least four incompatible units. This is what each one means in practice, what ours costs, and the question almost nobody asks that matters more than the headline rate.

The four pricing models, and what each is good at

Per minute of audio. The traditional model, and the easiest to reason about until you have a long file. It is honest and it scales linearly, which is exactly the problem: a three-hour recording costs thirty-six times a five-minute one even though the work is nowhere near thirty-six times harder.

Per seat, per month. Common in meeting tools. Good value if you transcribe constantly, poor value if you have one podcast back-catalogue to get through and then nothing for six months.

Free, funded by something else. Usually a browser extension reading a caption track the platform already published. This genuinely is free and genuinely does work — for videos that already have captions. It cannot do anything for a video without them, which is most of Facebook, Instagram, Google Drive and every uploaded file.

Per hour of video, which is what we do. One credit covers up to sixty minutes. A fifty-minute talk is one credit. A ninety-minute one is two. A six-hour stream is six. Nothing is metered by the second, so a forty-five minute video and a five-minute one cost the same.

What ours costs

Two credits arrive free when you create an account, which is enough for two hours of video before you decide anything.

After that, credit packs, cheaper per credit as they get larger:

• Micro — 3 credits, $3.99 (about $1.33 each)
• Starter — 10 credits, $5.99 (about $0.60 each)
• Popular — 30 credits, $11.99 (about $0.40 each)
• Pro — 80 credits, $22.99 (about $0.29 each)
• Power — 200 credits, $44.99 (about $0.22 each)

Credits do not expire and there is no subscription. Current prices are always on the pricing page; if they ever disagree with this post, the pricing page is right.

At the Power rate, a one-hour video costs about 22 cents. At the Micro rate it costs about a dollar. That spread is the honest trade: you are paying for the option not to commit.

Our caption path is not free, and we should say so

When a video already has a caption track we fetch and parse it, which takes milliseconds and costs us close to nothing. We still charge a credit for it. In our ledger, caption extractions account for 2,489 charges.

The argument for it is that you are paying for an answer, not for our compute, and you should not have to know which path your link will take before you know what it costs. The argument against it is that a browser extension will do that specific job for nothing. Both are true. If every video you care about already has captions, a free extension is the better tool and we would rather say so here than have you find out after paying.

Where a paid tool earns its money is the other case: no captions, awkward platform, long file, or a link that needs several attempts through different routes.

The question that matters more than the rate

What happens to your money when a job fails?

Failure is not hypothetical in this category. We publish our own numbers — success rates for every platform with enough traffic to have one — and the handful that read 100% are small samples of 18 to 49 attempts, not a promise. So the refund policy is not fine print, it is a meaningful part of the price.

Ours is automatic and unconditional: if a transcript does not finish, the credits go back without you asking. The ledger records it as its own entry, which means it can be checked rather than believed — 1,403 caption refunds and 920 AI refunds to date, and the invariant that a failed job must end up owing nothing is verified against the live database rather than assumed.

That extends to jobs killed by our own deployments. A job interrupted by a release is refunded on restart, because it was our fault, not the video's.

Three questions worth asking any tool before you pay:

1. Are failures refunded automatically, or do I have to ask? "Contact support for a refund" is a real cost measured in your time.

2. Is a partial transcript charged in full? A job that dies at eighty percent is a failure, not a delivery.

3. Does a retry cost again? If the first attempt failed for a reason on their side, the second should not be billed as a fresh job.

Working out what you will actually spend

Add up the hours of video, not the files. Round each video up to the next whole hour, because that is how the billing works, and it is where estimates go wrong — twelve twenty-minute videos are twelve credits, not four, since each one rounds up on its own.

Two worked examples:

• A 40-episode podcast back-catalogue, averaging 45 minutes. Forty credits, since each rounds to one. That is the Pro pack at $22.99, about 57 cents an episode.
• One 6-hour conference recording. Six credits. The Starter pack at $5.99 covers it with change.

If your videos are consistently short, the rounding works against you and a per-minute service will be cheaper. We would rather you knew that up front than worked it out afterwards.