Speech-to-text cost calculator
Price a transcription workload by hours of audio per month, across the main speech-to-text services.
Prices last verified against official provider pages on . How we verify prices. Written by the Chelure Enterprises Editorial Team.
How transcription is billed
Speech-to-text is billed per minute or per hour of audio. Batch (upload a file) transcription is cheaper than live, streaming transcription. xAI's batch speech-to-text is $0.10 per hour and its streaming price is $0.20. ElevenLabs Scribe is $0.20 per hour (live $0.22). Mistral's Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3 is $0.0035 per minute, about $0.21 per hour, and OpenAI's Whisper is $0.006 per minute, about $0.36 per hour.
Estimated prices
OpenAI bills gpt-4o-transcribe and gpt-4o-mini-transcribe by tokens and publishes about $0.006 and $0.003 per minute as estimates. Google and Z.ai also publish approximate per-minute figures. These rows are marked as estimates.
Transcription prices per model
| Provider | Model | Price (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | OpenAI gpt-transcribe | per minute $0.0045 |
| OpenAI | OpenAI Whisper | per minute $0.0060 |
| OpenAI | OpenAI gpt-4o-transcribe | per minute (estimated by OpenAI) $0.0060 |
| OpenAI | OpenAI gpt-4o-mini-transcribe | per minute (estimated by OpenAI) $0.0030 |
| OpenAI | OpenAI gpt-live-transcribe (live) | per minute $0.017 |
| xAI | xAI Speech to Text (batch) | per hour $0.10 |
| xAI | xAI Speech to Text (streaming) | per hour $0.20 |
| Mistral | Voxtral Mini Transcribe 3 | per minute $0.0035 |
| Mistral | Voxtral Small Transcribe 3 | per minute $0.0040 |
| Mistral | Voxtral Mini Transcribe Realtime 3 | per minute $0.0080 |
| ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs Scribe v3 / v2 | per hour $0.20 |
| ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs Scribe v3 Live | per hour $0.22 |
| Gemini 3.5 Transcribe | per minute (blended estimate) $0.0050 | |
| Gemini 3.5 Transcribe Live | per minute (blended estimate) $0.0090 | |
| Z.ai | GLM-ASR-2512 | per minute (approx.) $0.0024 |
Sources: OpenAI, xAI, Mistral, ElevenLabs, Google, Z.ai. Prices verified November 13, 2026.
Frequently asked questions
How much does transcription cost per hour?
From $0.10 per hour for xAI batch up to about $1.02 for OpenAI's live transcription.
Is live transcription more expensive?
Yes. Streaming and realtime models cost more per hour than batch models from the same provider.
Are these prices exact?
Most are published rates. Where a provider bills by tokens and publishes only an estimate per minute, the row says so.
Cite this page: Speech-to-text cost calculator. Createchz AI Tools, verified November 13, 2026. https://createchz.com/ai-voice-music/speech-to-text-cost-calculator/