Deepgram vs OpenAI Whisper / GPT-4o Transcribe pricing
Both are in speech-to-text apis. Deepgram is billed per minute (usage-based); OpenAI Whisper / GPT-4o Transcribe is billed per minute (per-second billed). 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
OpenAI Whisper / GPT-4o TranscribeNo free tier
- Free tier
- None (pay-per-use)
- Billed
- Per minute (per-second billed)
- Best for
- Transcription inside the OpenAI model API
- 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
OpenAI Whisper / GPT-4o Transcribe plans
| Plan | Price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| whisper-1 | $0.006 / min | Original hosted Whisper model; billed per second of audio duration, ~$0.36/hour. |
| gpt-4o-transcribe | $0.006 / min (~$6.00 / 1M audio input tokens) | Flagship GPT-4o speech-to-text; lower WER and better multilingual accuracy than Whisper. |
| gpt-4o-mini-transcribe | $0.003 / min (~$3.00 / 1M audio input tokens) | Cost-efficient smaller model, half the price of the flagship. |
| gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize | Usage-based (audio token pricing) | Adds built-in speaker diarization; Transcription API only, returns diarized_json with A:/B: speaker labels. |
- Token-based GPT-4o billing can produce less predictable costs on long audio than flat per-minute pricing