How much does transcription cost?

Certified transcripts for official filings, broadcast-quality captions with strict formatting, and genuinely terrible audio that AI mangles. For everyday meetings, lectures, interviews and content work, AI plus a few minutes of your own editing wins on both cost and speed; the accuracy numbers explain why.

Free transcription tools typically fund themselves one of three ways: hard limits designed as a paywall, advertising and data harvesting, or throttled processing. A capped free tier from a subscription company is the transparent version of the trade, because free users who hit a real wall become paying users. Trustample's is 60 minutes every 30 days with the same engine and editor paid users get; the free-routes guide compares the alternatives.

For occasional use, sometimes. Pay-as-you-go runs $0.10–$0.25 per audio minute ($6–$15/hour), which beats a subscription you barely use. Past a few hours a month, subscriptions win decisively.

In Trustample, nothing extra: Basic includes 100 AI actions a month (summaries and content drafts) and Pro 200, adding chat questions and translations, inside the subscription price. Tools that meter AI separately can surprise you; check before relying on one. Sonix bills by the hour instead of by subscription, which changes the arithmetic completely, and the comparison works through when that comes out cheaper.