Deepgram vs Google Cloud Speech-to-Text pricing
Both are in speech-to-text apis. Deepgram 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.
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
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
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
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