Deepgram vs AssemblyAI pricing
Both are in speech-to-text apis. Deepgram is billed per minute (usage-based); AssemblyAI is billed per minute (usage-based). Numbers below are copied from each vendor's pricing page.
DeepgramFree tier or trial
- Free tier
- $200 credit, no card
- Billed
- Per minute (usage-based)
- Best for
- Real-time streaming STT for voice agents
- Verified
- Jun 27, 2026
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
Deepgram plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Pay As You Go | $0.0077/hr pre-recorded; $0.0048/min streaming (Nova-3 monolingual) | No minimums, no credit card; new users get $200 free credit. Multilingual Nova-3 is $0.0092/hr pre-recorded / $0.0058/min streaming. |
| Growth | $0.0065/hr pre-recorded; $0.0042/min streaming (Nova-3 monolingual) | Annual pre-paid credits save up to ~20%; higher concurrency limits. Commonly cited ~$4,000 annual minimum. |
| Enterprise | Custom | For large volumes, data residency / self-hosted (Dedicated single-tenant) deployments, 99.9% uptime SLA, and dedicated support. |
| Aura-2 Text-to-Speech | $0.030 / 1,000 chars (PAYG); $0.027 (Growth) | Aura-1 is $0.0150 / 1,000 chars (PAYG). |
| Voice Agent API | From $0.075/min (PAYG); $0.068/min (Growth) | Bundled STT+LLM+TTS; advanced tiers up to ~$0.163/min, with discounts for bring-your-own LLM/TTS. |
- Cost can climb sharply at very high audio volumes despite low unit price
Source: https://deepgram.com/pricing
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)