Free gets you the words from a short, clean file
One clear speaker, a quiet room and a few minutes of audio: a free route gets you the words. Paid earns its price on length, a second speaker or a deadline.
When a free route works
The three free routes on this page are a trial with 30 minutes, an open-source model you run yourself, and dictation through a document's microphone. All three suit a short recording you will read once.
When paid earns its price
Long files make a real-time-only tool impractical, several speakers need labels a free route will not give you, and raw text is rarely the finished product: the interview becomes an article, the episode needs captions, the research needs timestamps to cite. An editor plus Word, PDF and subtitle exports is what you pay for.
Our transcription cost guide puts a half-hour file at two to four hours of a transcriptionist's time, and a free draft at about an hour of correction. Sonix returns a one-hour file in 5 to 6 minutes, and the correcting happens in the editor against the audio.
What transcription costs, in detailLimits and price, plainly
- Files up to 16 GB each.
- A trial transcribes the first 30 minutes of a long file.
- On a trial, very long files wait for a quick approval.
- Trial accounts upload one file at a time; paid accounts upload in batches.
- After the free minutes: $10 an hour pay as you go, or a plan from $25 a month.
Every plan, on one page