The short answer
Deepgram is billed per minute (usage-based). It has a free tier: $200 credit, no card. The paid plans we list start at From $0.075/min (PAYG); $0.068/min (Growth) (Voice Agent API).
Plans and prices
| 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. |
How Deepgram bills you
The pricing model is per minute (usage-based). Voice-AI specialist with the Nova-3 and Flux models, known for sub-300ms streaming latency and a developer-first console. Best suited to: real-time streaming stt for voice agents.
What to watch for on the bill
- Cost can climb sharply at very high audio volumes despite low unit price
The pricing page we read
Source: https://deepgram.com/pricing. Prices change, so confirm there before you commit.
Compare Deepgram with alternatives
- Deepgram vs AssemblyAI pricing
- Deepgram vs OpenAI Whisper / GPT-4o Transcribe pricing
- Deepgram vs Google Cloud Speech-to-Text pricing
Other speech-to-text apis: AssemblyAI, OpenAI Whisper / GPT-4o Transcribe, Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, Amazon Transcribe, Speechmatics.
Looking at quality rather than price? See the Deepgram score on APIbenchmarks. Full entry: Deepgram pricing.