The short answer
Speechmatics is billed per minute (usage-based). It has a free tier: 8 hrs/mo (480 min). The paid plans we list start at From ~$0.129/hour (batch from ~$0.0050/min, real-time from ~$0.0067/min) (Pro (usage-based)).
Plans and prices
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 3,000 STT minutes/month (50 hrs) + 1M TTS characters/month, 2 concurrent real-time sessions, 56+ languages, multi-region cloud. |
| Pro (usage-based) | From ~$0.129/hour (batch from ~$0.0050/min, real-time from ~$0.0067/min) | Includes 3,000 free STT minutes/month then pay-as-you-go; up to 50 concurrent real-time sessions, 10 file jobs/sec, capped at 6,000 hours/month; billed to the second; email support. |
| Enterprise | Custom | No rate limits, all features incl. audio alignment, custom models/voices, SaaS or on-premises deployment, highest concurrency, dedicated support; volume discounts that scale. |
How Speechmatics bills you
The pricing model is per minute (usage-based). UK-based accuracy and multilingual specialist (55+ languages, strong accent coverage) with batch, real-time, and on-prem deployment options. Best suited to: multilingual accuracy, on-prem capable.
What to watch for on the bill
- Premium pricing, reviewers repeatedly say cost limits accessibility versus commodity APIs and open-source Whisper
- Pro tier has a hard 6,000-hours/month cap, pushing heavy users to custom Enterprise contracts
- No openly published numeric uptime SLA for self-serve tiers
The pricing page we read
Source: https://www.speechmatics.com/pricing. Prices change, so confirm there before you commit.
Compare Speechmatics with alternatives
Other speech-to-text apis: Deepgram, AssemblyAI, OpenAI Whisper / GPT-4o Transcribe, Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, Amazon Transcribe.
Looking at quality rather than price? See the Speechmatics score on APIbenchmarks. Full entry: Speechmatics pricing.