{"slug":"best-cheap-speech-to-text-api","title":"Best cheap speech-to-text API","question":"What are the best cheap speech-to-text APIs in 2026 — lowest price per minute of transcription that is still accurate?","category":"Voice AI","url":"https://modelsagree.com/best/best-cheap-speech-to-text-api","updated":"2026-07-15","models":["ChatGPT","Claude","Gemini","Grok"],"consensus":"1 of 4 models rank Groq the top pick","disagreement":"ChatGPT picks Cloudflare Workers AI; Gemini picks DeepInfra; Grok picks Rev AI","combined":[{"rank":1,"product":"Groq","domain":"groq.com","score":12,"appearances":3,"modelRanks":{"ChatGPT":2,"Claude":1,"Gemini":3},"reason":"Cheapest hosted transcription that's still genuinely accurate — roughly $0.04/hour (~$0.0007/min) for OpenAI's Whisper large-v3-turbo weights served on Groq's LPUs, with faster-than-real-time turnaround measured in seconds; for the typical developer batch-transcribing podcasts, calls, or user audio, nothing hosted comes close on price-per-accurate-minute"},{"rank":2,"product":"Cloudflare Workers AI","domain":"cloudflare.com","score":9,"appearances":2,"modelRanks":{"ChatGPT":1,"Gemini":2},"reason":"Exceptional batch value at $0.0005/audio minute, with strong multilingual Whisper accuracy and a generous daily free allocation; narrowly beats Groq on raw cost."},{"rank":3,"product":"AssemblyAI","domain":"assemblyai.com","score":5,"appearances":3,"modelRanks":{"ChatGPT":4,"Claude":5,"Gemini":4},"reason":"At $0.21/hour, it pairs strong messy-speech and entity accuracy with prompting, custom spelling, language detection, formatting, and word timestamps; worth the small premium for transcript usability."},{"rank":4,"product":"Deepgram","domain":"deepgram.com","score":5,"appearances":2,"modelRanks":{"Claude":2,"Gemini":5},"reason":"Best accuracy-per-dollar among purpose-built STT vendors at ~$0.0043/min pay-as-you-go; Nova-3 beats Whisper-class models on noisy, multi-speaker, real-world audio, and you get streaming, diarization, keyterm prompting, and smart formatting in one API — the pick when the audio is hard, not just the price low"},{"rank":5,"product":"DeepInfra","domain":"deepinfra.com","score":5,"appearances":1,"modelRanks":{"Gemini":1},"reason":"Offers the lowest raw pricing on the market at $0.00020/min for Whisper Large V3 Turbo and $0.00045/min for Whisper Large V3, running on high-concurrency serverless GPU infrastructure."},{"rank":6,"product":"Rev AI","domain":"rev.ai","score":5,"appearances":1,"modelRanks":{"Grok":1},"reason":"Lowest pricing at ~$0.002/min ($0.12/hr) for English batch/async with solid real-world accuracy for cost-sensitive use cases, strong on long-form/archival audio per benchmarks; ideal for typical practitioners needing high volume without"},{"rank":7,"product":"OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-transcribe","domain":"openai.com","score":3,"appearances":1,"modelRanks":{"Claude":3},"reason":"$0.003/min with word error rates better than the original whisper-1 endpoint ($0.006/min), trivially adopted since most stacks already have an OpenAI key; near-tie with Deepgram — it wins on simplicity and raw WER on clean audio, Deepgram wins on features"},{"rank":8,"product":"Speechmatics","domain":"speechmatics.com","score":3,"appearances":1,"modelRanks":{"ChatGPT":3},"reason":"$0.129/hour with broad accent and 56+ language coverage, per-second billing, diarization, timestamps, and formatting—arguably the best cheap full-featured transcription API."},{"rank":9,"product":"faster-whisper","domain":"github.com","score":2,"appearances":1,"modelRanks":{"Claude":4},"reason":"Zero per-minute cost — the CTranslate2 reimplementation runs Whisper large-v3 ~4x faster than reference on a single consumer or spot-priced GPU, so effective cost lands around $0.0001-0.0005/min at even modest volume, with full data privacy; at sustained scale this beats every commercial API"},{"rank":10,"product":"Google Cloud Speech-to-Text","domain":"cloud.google.com","score":1,"appearances":1,"modelRanks":{"ChatGPT":5},"reason":"Strong multilingual accuracy and mature cloud controls for $0.003/minute in asynchronous dynamic-batch mode, especially attractive for large archives already on Google Cloud."}],"perModel":{"ChatGPT":[{"rank":1,"product":"Cloudflare Workers AI","reason":"Exceptional batch value at $0.0005/audio minute, with strong multilingual Whisper accuracy and a generous daily free allocation; narrowly beats Groq on raw cost.","fix":"Batch-oriented and comparatively bare-bones—no native diarization or polished transcription workflow, and sustained usage requires a paid Workers plan."},{"rank":2,"product":"Groq","reason":"Near-tied for first: accurate multilingual transcription at $0.04/hour, extremely fast inference, and an easy OpenAI-compatible API make it unusually practical.","fix":"File transcription rather than true streaming, with minimum-duration billing and fewer speech-specific features than specialist APIs."},{"rank":3,"product":"Speechmatics","reason":"$0.129/hour with broad accent and 56+ language coverage, per-second billing, diarization, timestamps, and formatting—arguably the best cheap full-featured transcription API.","fix":"Batch-only at this price; enhanced accuracy and real-time operation cost materially more."},{"rank":4,"product":"AssemblyAI","reason":"At $0.21/hour, it pairs strong messy-speech and entity accuracy with prompting, custom spelling, language detection, formatting, and word timestamps; worth the small premium for transcript usability.","fix":"Supports far fewer languages than Whisper or Speechmatics, and diarization or other intelligence features can raise the effective price."},{"rank":5,"product":"Google Cloud Speech-to-Text","reason":"Strong multilingual accuracy and mature cloud controls for $0.003/minute in asynchronous dynamic-batch mode, especially attractive for large archives already on Google Cloud.","fix":"The bargain price requires delay-tolerant batch processing; ordinary real-time or synchronous recognition is far more expensive."}],"Claude":[{"rank":1,"product":"Groq","reason":"Cheapest hosted transcription that's still genuinely accurate — roughly $0.04/hour (~$0.0007/min) for OpenAI's Whisper large-v3-turbo weights served on Groq's LPUs, with faster-than-real-time turnaround measured in seconds; for the typical developer batch-transcribing podcasts, calls, or user audio, nothing hosted comes close on price-per-accurate-minute","fix":"Batch/pre-recorded only with a bare-bones feature set — no streaming, weak diarization, and rate limits on lower tiers make it wrong for real-time voice agents or enterprise SLAs"},{"rank":2,"product":"Deepgram","reason":"Best accuracy-per-dollar among purpose-built STT vendors at ~$0.0043/min pay-as-you-go; Nova-3 beats Whisper-class models on noisy, multi-speaker, real-world audio, and you get streaming, diarization, keyterm prompting, and smart formatting in one API — the pick when the audio is hard, not just the price low","fix":"5-6x Groq's price, so pure-batch users with clean audio overpay; volume discounts require committed-spend contracts"},{"rank":3,"product":"OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-transcribe","reason":"$0.003/min with word error rates better than the original whisper-1 endpoint ($0.006/min), trivially adopted since most stacks already have an OpenAI key; near-tie with Deepgram — it wins on simplicity and raw WER on clean audio, Deepgram wins on features","fix":"No speaker diarization and limited timestamp granularity, so it's not for meeting-transcription products; as an LLM-based transcriber it can occasionally hallucinate fluent-but-wrong text on silence or noise"},{"rank":4,"product":"faster-whisper","reason":"Zero per-minute cost — the CTranslate2 reimplementation runs Whisper large-v3 ~4x faster than reference on a single consumer or spot-priced GPU, so effective cost lands around $0.0001-0.0005/min at even modest volume, with full data privacy; at sustained scale this beats every commercial API","fix":"You operate the infrastructure — GPU provisioning, scaling, and no support; below roughly a few hundred hours/month the engineering time costs more than just paying Groq"},{"rank":5,"product":"AssemblyAI","reason":"Aggressive price cuts brought Universal to ~$0.0025-0.003/min (~$0.15/hr) with accuracy competitive with Deepgram and the strongest bundled extras at this price — diarization, sentiment, PII redaction, and audio-intelligence add-ons that would cost extra elsewhere","fix":"Cheapest rates assume prepaid/volume tiers and the add-ons that justify choosing it each bill separately; pure transcription users on small volumes pay more per minute than Groq or gpt-4o-mini-transcribe"}],"Gemini":[{"rank":1,"product":"DeepInfra","reason":"Offers the lowest raw pricing on the market at $0.00020/min for Whisper Large V3 Turbo and $0.00045/min for Whisper Large V3, running on high-concurrency serverless GPU infrastructure.","fix":"Provides only raw transcription outputs without advanced features like diarization, custom vocabulary, or audio intelligence."},{"rank":2,"product":"Cloudflare Workers AI","reason":"Extremely cost-effective at $0.00045/min for Whisper and $0.00051/min for Whisper Large V3 Turbo, with edge-hosted serverless execution and a generous free daily neuron tier.","fix":"Bound by strict file size and execution limits inherent to serverless workers, requiring audio files to be pre-split into small segments."},{"rank":3,"product":"Groq","reason":"Delivers near-instantaneous transcription speed (up to 200x real-time) at $0.00067/min for Whisper Large V3 Turbo, using highly optimized LPU hardware.","fix":"Subject to strict rate limits on request concurrency and volume, making it difficult to scale without enterprise negotiation."},{"rank":4,"product":"AssemblyAI","reason":"Exceptional accuracy on noisy audio and accents for $0.0025/min (Universal-2) or $0.0035/min (Universal-3 Pro Async), combined with robust speaker diarization and audio intelligence tools.","fix":"Advanced features (like diarization and summarization) carry modular add-on costs that can quickly double or triple the base price."},{"rank":5,"product":"Deepgram","reason":"Optimized for real-time streaming conversational applications with pricing starting around $0.0043/min to $0.0052/min for batch, utilizing highly efficient Nova-2 and Nova-3 models.","fix":"Streaming endpoints are more expensive ($0.0077/min) and all intelligence features must be paid for as separate add-ons."}],"Grok":[{"rank":1,"product":"Rev AI","reason":"Lowest pricing at ~$0.002/min ($0.12/hr) for English batch/async with solid real-world accuracy for cost-sensitive use cases, strong on long-form/archival audio per benchmarks; ideal for typical practitioners needing high volume without","fix":null}]},"missedByModel":{"ChatGPT":[{"product":"Deepgram Nova-3","reason":"excellent noisy-audio and streaming performance, but its $0.0048–$0.0077/minute pricing trails stronger budget values"},{"product":"faster-whisper","reason":"can be extremely cheap at sustained self-hosted volume, but infrastructure, scaling, diarization, and idle-capacity costs prevent a universally credible per-minute API price"}],"Claude":[{"product":"Speechmatics","reason":"excellent multilingual accuracy but ~$0.008/min+ pricing puts it outside the \"cheap\" bracket"},{"product":"Fireworks AI Whisper serving","reason":"comparably cheap Whisper-as-a-service to Groq, but slower, less proven at scale, and adds nothing over Groq's offering"}],"Gemini":[{"product":"OpenAI Whisper API","reason":"priced at $0.006/min, which is up to 30x more expensive than DeepInfra and has slower processing times"},{"product":"Gladia","reason":"priced at $0.010/min, which makes it too expensive to compete on a budget despite its high-quality bundled features"}]}}