The short answer
Amazon Transcribe is billed per minute (volume-tiered). It has a free tier: 60 min/mo, 12 months. The paid plans we list start at from $0.0024/min (Add-ons (PII Redaction / Custom Language Models / Gen Summarization)).
Plans and prices
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | $0 / 60 min per month | 60 audio minutes/month free for the first 12 months across standard, Call Analytics and Medical. |
| Standard Batch Transcription | $0.024/min (tier 1) | Tiered volume pricing: ~$0.024/min for the first 250K min, dropping to ~$0.015, ~$0.0102 and ~$0.0078/min at higher volume tiers (US East). AWS lists base batch at $0.006/min before feature bundling. |
| Streaming Transcription | $0.024/min (tier 1) | Real-time WebSocket/HTTP-2 streaming, same tiered volume discount structure as batch. |
| Transcribe Medical | $0.075/min batch, $0.10/min streaming | HIPAA-eligible clinical ASR, ~3x the standard rate. |
| Call Analytics | $0.0300/min (tier 1) | Post-call and real-time contact-center analytics; falls to $0.0186/min (next 750K) and $0.0138/min (over 1M min). |
| Add-ons (PII Redaction / Custom Language Models / Gen Summarization) | from $0.0024/min | PII redaction $0.0024 → $0.00102/min; generative call summarization $0.0024 → $0.0011/min; custom language models follow the standard tiered schedule. Billed on top of base transcription. |
How Amazon Transcribe bills you
The pricing model is per minute (volume-tiered). AWS-native STT with volume tiering, deep IAM/S3 integration and proven hyperscaler reliability; powerful but verbose AWS-style docs and console. Best suited to: stt integrated into the aws stack.
What to watch for on the bill
- Weaker accuracy and coverage for non-English dialects, especially Spanish and Portuguese variants
- Feature add-ons (diarization, PII redaction, Call Analytics, Medical) stack extra per-minute charges, leading to surprise bills above the headline rate
- No single hard uptime guarantee, SLA is 'commercially reasonable efforts' toward 99.9% with credits only after the fact
The pricing page we read
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/pricing/. Prices change, so confirm there before you commit.
Compare Amazon Transcribe with alternatives
Other speech-to-text apis: Deepgram, AssemblyAI, OpenAI Whisper / GPT-4o Transcribe, Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, Speechmatics.
Looking at quality rather than price? See the Amazon Transcribe score on APIbenchmarks. Full entry: Amazon Transcribe pricing.