Cheapest transcription API.
Prices checked
Scribe v2 at Vercel AI Gateway leads 6 models at $0.11 per hour of audio, checked .
Top 6
all speech models- 1
Scribe v2
Trains on prompts
Vercel AI Gateway · speech to text · 2 providers$0.11per hour of audio - 2
Scribe 1
Maker's price
ElevenLabs · speech to text · 1 provider$0.22per hour of audio - 3
Nova 2
Maker's price
Deepgram · speech to text · 1 provider$0.26per hour of audio - 4
Nova 3 Medical
Maker's priceDeepgram · speech to text · 1 provider$0.31per hour of audio - 5
Whisper
Azure AI Foundry · speech to text · open weights · 3 providers$0.36per hour of audio - 6
Whisper
Deepgram · speech to text · open weights · 2 providers$0.36per hour of audio
How we count
Every model that turns recorded audio into text and has a price we can hold beside the others, cheapest first. 6 qualify, from $0.11 an hour. Where a lab prices several variants of one model the same, one of them stands for the rest. Prices are for one hour of recorded audio transcribed in batch on the standard model.
A price below the lab's own is listed only when the provider says why.
- Trains on prompts
- The provider says it may train on what you send it, which is what pays for the lower price.
- Maker's price
- What the lab that trained the model charges on its own API. Every other row is measured against it.
Frequently asked
- What is the cheapest of the transcription models right now?
- Scribe v2 at Vercel AI Gateway, $0.11 per hour of audio, read on 1 Nov 2026.
- Which lab shows up most in this ranking?
- ElevenLabs trained 2 of the top 6 models here.
- How is this ranked, and how current is it?
- Every row is the cheapest price for that model that we can hold beside the others: the lab's own, a price below it with a published reason, or a price at or above it. A price that buys a different task, or a resolution the lab's own price does not state, or a unit we will not convert without publishing the assumption, is listed on the model's page and not ranked. Prices are read every 3 days from 7 providers' public catalogs, against a typical $0.36 per hour of audio. Last refresh: 1 Nov 2026.