Pricing Guide

Transcription pricing at a glance

Transcription belongs in the production budget

A transcript is the cheapest asset a recording produces, and the one most budgets leave out.

What a transcript is used for

A transcript turns a recording into something you can search, quote, and reuse. Marketing teams cut a one-hour webinar into an article, a newsletter, and a week of social posts. Search engines index the text of a video, not the video itself, so the transcript is what gets the recording found. Training and HR teams turn a seminar into a reference document and hand it to the people who could not attend.

Why it gets left out of the budget

Most production budgets go to equipment, editing, and post-production, and the transcript is an afterthought. Free tools then produce a draft that needs an hour of manual correction, and a professional service produces a clean transcript that arrives days later at a price nobody planned for. Knowing the rates in advance is what keeps that choice from being made in a hurry.

Transcription is billed three ways

Most services bill per audio minute; per-line and per-working-hour billing exist, but they are harder to compare and rarer.

Per audio minute or audio hour

The most common model charges for the length of the recording, not the time it takes to transcribe. A 30-minute file costs 30 audio minutes whether it takes the transcriptionist two hours or four. This is the unit the comparison table above uses and the unit Sonix bills in, so every figure on this page is an audio-hour figure unless it says otherwise.

Per line or per page

Output-based billing charges for the length of the finished transcript. It is common in medical transcription, where a typical rate is 7 to 14 cents per line, and some services quote per page instead. It only becomes comparable to an audio-hour rate once you know how many lines an hour of speech produces, which depends on the speaker and the formatting.

Per hour of the transcriptionist's time

A smaller group of specialist transcriptionists charge for their working time, typically $25 to $40 per hour, with interview work closer to $50. Read these quotes carefully: they are working-hour rates, not audio-hour rates, and one hour of audio takes considerably longer than an hour to transcribe by hand, so the audio-hour equivalent is a multiple of the figure quoted.

Human rates: $100 to $150 per audio hour

Budget $100 to $150 per audio hour for a clean, standard-turnaround human transcript; about $90 is the floor, and every modifier pushes the quote up.

About $1.50 an audio minute

In the US and Canada, a native-speaker transcriptionist typically starts at about $90 per audio hour, or $1.50 per audio minute, for clear audio with one or two speakers and a standard turnaround of 24 to 48 hours. Quotes below $1 per audio minute usually mean the work is going to a non-native speaker or an offshore team, and the accuracy tends to show it. Once the modifiers below are applied, most finished quotes land between $100 and $150 per audio hour, which is the range the comparison table uses.

What pushes a quote above the base

The four cards above cover the big ones: difficult audio adds 25 to 50%, three or more speakers add about $0.25 per audio minute, same-day delivery can double the rate, and timestamps, subtitles, and translations are each billed as extras. One more factor does not fit on a card: location. Transcriptionists based in North America charge more than teams in countries where English is not the first language, because a native speaker catches the idiom, the accents, and the half-finished sentences that trip up everyone else.

Why it is a range and not a number

The modifiers stack. Two recordings of the same length can differ by 50% or more in price if one is a clean studio interview and the other is a four-person call over a bad line with a deadline tomorrow. That is why the worked examples below show a spread for the human side and a single figure for Sonix.

Sonix: $10 per audio hour, whatever the file

Sonix bills $10 per audio hour, prorated to the second, and the price does not move for noisy audio, extra speakers, rush, or add-ons.

One rate, prorated to the second

Pay-as-you-go works the way a transcriptionist's audio-hour billing works, without the surcharge matrix. A 52-minute file is billed as 52 minutes ($8.67), a 6-minute clip costs $1, and there is no minimum charge and no rush tier. The rate is the same for a podcast with one voice and a conference call with six.

What the $10 includes

Everything in the comparison table's Sonix column comes with the transcript: speaker labels, word-level timestamps, subtitles in SRT and VTT, the browser editor, folders and sharing, and SOC 2 Type 2 security. Translation into 54+ languages runs on the same hours rather than as a separate fee, so translating a 30-minute transcript uses another 30 minutes of your balance.

Accuracy and turnaround

Accuracy sits in the 85 to 98% range. Clean audio with one or two speakers lands at the top of it; crosstalk, background noise, and heavy accents land toward the bottom, and the editor is how you close the gap: click any word to jump to that moment in the recording, correct it, and move on. Turnaround is about 3 minutes for a 30-minute file, and the transcript opens in the editor the moment it is ready.

Two worked examples

A 30-minute interview costs $45 to $75 from a human service and $5 from Sonix; a 10-hour batch costs $1,000 to $1,500 against $100.

A 30-minute interview, two speakers, clean audio

• Human service at the $1.50 base rate: 30 x $1.50 = $45.
• Human service at the typical $100 to $150 per hour: $50 to $75, back in 24 to 48 hours.
• Sonix pay-as-you-go: 0.5 x $10 = $5, prorated to the second, back in about 3 minutes.
• Sonix on Core: inside the 5 included hours, so $2.50 of a $25 month and nothing extra.
• Sonix on a new account: $0, because the 30 free minutes cover it.
• Add a Spanish translation on pay-as-you-go: another 30 minutes of hours, so $5 more.

Against the $45 to $75 human quote, the $5 pay-as-you-go price is a saving of 89 to 93%, which is where the 90% on this page comes from.

A noisy 10-hour batch of meetings

• Human base: 600 minutes x $1.50 = $900.
• Speaker surcharge: 600 x $0.25 = $150, so $1,050.
• Difficult-audio surcharge: 25 to 50% of the base, so $1,275 to $1,500, which matches the table's $100 to $150 per hour.
• Same-day delivery: up to double, so $2,550 to $3,000.
• Sonix pay-as-you-go: 10 x $10 = $100, every file back in about 3 minutes.
• Sonix on Core: $25 plus 5 extra hours at $10, so $75.
• Sonix on Advanced: $50, with 10 of the 20 included hours still unused. Pro would cost $80 for the month.

Against the $1,050 standard quote, pay-as-you-go saves about 90% and Advanced saves 95%.

The pattern

The human quote moves with every property of the file: length, speakers, audio quality, deadline, and extras. The Sonix price moves with length alone. When your files vary, that is the difference between a quote you have to request and a number you can work out yourself. The cost calculator does the arithmetic for your own hours, team seats, and AI analysis time.

Open the cost calculator

Subscriptions win from 2.5 hours

Core's $25 a month covers 5 hours, so it undercuts pay-as-you-go from 2.5 hours; Advanced and Pro bring the effective rate down to $2.50 and $2.00 per hour of audio.

Effective cost per hour on each plan

• Pay-as-you-go: $10 per hour, no commitment.
• Core: $25 a month for 5 hours, or $5.00 per hour.
• Advanced: $50 a month for 20 hours, or $2.50 per hour.
• Pro: $80 a month for 40 hours, or $2.00 per hour.
• On every plan, extra hours cost $10 each and extra team seats cost $25 a month.

Each plan also comes with AI analysis hours for summaries and answers: 5 on Core, 25 on Advanced, and 100 on Pro.

Where each plan wins

Work out your monthly hours and read down the ladder. Below 2.5 hours, pay-as-you-go is cheapest. From 2.5 to 7.5 hours, Core wins. From 7.5 to 23 hours, Advanced wins. From 23 hours, Pro wins, and past roughly 80 hours a month it is worth a conversation about an enterprise agreement. The crossovers are simple arithmetic: a plan wins the moment its monthly price is less than the pay-as-you-go cost of the hours you actually use.

Annual billing: 1 month free

Paying annually costs 11 months for 12, so Core is $275 a year, Advanced $550, and Pro $880, and the hours pool for the whole year (60, 240, and 480) instead of resetting each month. That suits seasonal workloads, a semester of lectures or a quarter of interviews, and it takes the effective rate to about $4.58, $2.29, and $1.83 per hour.

Three jobs worth the human rate

Pay the human rate when the transcript must be certified, when it is the official record of a proceeding, or when the audio is so degraded or multilingual that someone has to replay it.

Certified transcripts and official records

Courts and some regulators require a certified transcript signed by an accredited transcriptionist or court reporter, and an AI transcript does not meet that requirement however accurate it is. Many court reporters now start from an AI draft and certify the corrected result, which is the sensible way to pay the human rate only for the part that needs a human.

Degraded or mixed-language audio

A recording with heavy noise, several people talking over each other, or a conversation that switches language mid-sentence sits at the bottom of the accuracy range, and a person who can replay a two-second fragment ten times still wins the last few percent. Expect the 25 to 50% difficult-audio surcharge for it, and expect it to be worth paying when the recording matters.

The hybrid workflow most teams use

Most teams do not choose one or the other. They run everything through Sonix, send only the recordings that need certification to a human service, and keep the 90% saving on the bulk of their hours. The AI transcript also makes the human job cheaper, because a transcriptionist correcting a draft usually works faster than one starting from silence.

Five ways to lower your transcription bill

Clean audio, one microphone per speaker, batching into a plan month, editing in the browser instead of buying rush, and the 30 free trial minutes each cut the bill without changing the rate.

Record clean audio

A quiet room, a microphone close to the speaker, and a test recording before the real one avoid the 25 to 50% surcharge a human service charges for difficult audio, and they land your file at the top of the accuracy range on Sonix, which means less editing afterwards.

Give each speaker a microphone

If you can record each speaker on a separate track, upload the tracks together as a multitrack file and Sonix merges them into one transcript with the speakers already labeled. On the human side, clearly separated voices avoid the speaker surcharge and the clarification emails that come with a crowded recording.

Batch recordings into a plan month

If you know roughly how many hours you record, pick the plan from the ladder above and let the recordings flow in: connect Zoom or Google Drive and every new recording is transcribed automatically, so nothing waits for someone to remember to upload it.

Fix the last few percent in the browser instead of paying for rush

Same-day delivery from a human service can double the price. The Sonix transcript is back in minutes, so the time you would have paid for goes into a quick edit instead: click a word to jump to that point in the recording, correct it in place, and strike through anything you do not need.

Try the free minutes on a real file first

Every new account starts with 30 free minutes and no credit card, so the 30-minute interview from the worked example costs nothing on a free trial. Upload the hardest file you have, not the easiest, and you will know where your recordings sit in the accuracy range before you spend anything.