AssemblyAI vs Google Cloud Speech-to-Text pricing
Both are in speech-to-text apis. AssemblyAI is billed per minute (usage-based); Google Cloud Speech-to-Text is billed per 15 seconds. Numbers below are copied from each vendor's pricing page.
AssemblyAIFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- $50 one-time credit
- Billed
- Per minute (usage-based)
- Best for
- Accurate STT plus audio intelligence
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
Google Cloud Speech-to-TextFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- 60 min/mo + $300 credit
- Billed
- Per 15 seconds
- Best for
- Enterprise multilingual STT on GCP
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
AssemblyAI plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Free credits | $50 free | No credit card required; 5 new streams/min concurrency limit. Self-serve signup. |
| Universal-2 (async STT) | $0.15/hr | Pre-recorded transcription, billed per second; lowest base rate tier. |
| Universal-3 Pro (async STT) | $0.21/hr | Higher-accuracy async model (~5.6% mean WER, keyterm prompting). |
| Universal-Streaming | $0.15/hr | Real-time English/multilingual; billed per WebSocket session duration. |
| Voice Agent API | $4.50/hr ($0.075/min) | All-inclusive STT + LLM + TTS + turn detection + tool calling. |
| Enterprise | Custom | 99.9% uptime SLA, custom SLOs, volume pricing, committed-use; 600M+ monthly inference calls capacity. |
- Add-on features (diarization, entity detection, redaction, translation) stack on the base rate, pushing effective cost well above the $0.15/hr headline (~$0.35/hr in independent estimates)
- Cost becomes expensive at high audio volume for usage-heavy apps
- Billing-UX friction reported (e.g. difficulty removing a card or disabling autopay)
Google Cloud Speech-to-Text plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Standard (v2 / Chirp) | $0.016 / minute | Real-time and batch transcription on the v2 API; Chirp models included at no surcharge. Down from $0.024/min on v1. |
| Dynamic Batch | ~$0.004 / minute (≈75% off Standard) | Discounted async tier for non-urgent jobs with results delivered within up to 24 hours. |
| Volume / committed-use tiers | as low as $0.004 / minute | Per-minute rate drops at high monthly transcription volumes. |
| Legacy v1 API | $0.024 / minute | Older API generation; standard and enhanced/phone-call models. |
| Free tier | $0 for first 60 min/month | 60 minutes of audio free each month; new Google Cloud customers also get $300 in credits. |
- Confusing v1-vs-v2 split with different features, prices and regional availability
- Add-ons such as speaker diarization cost extra and are not transparently documented on the public pricing page
- Effective bill often exceeds the headline $0.016/min once GCP overhead and add-ons are counted