Is Deepgram free? What it actually costs in 2026
Deepgram gives new accounts $200 of free credit, then bills pay-as-you-go from $0.0043 a minute for pre-recorded Nova-3 speech-to-text.
There is no permanent free tier; there is a $200 starting credit, which at $0.0043 a minute is roughly 775 hours of pre-recorded transcription before the first bill.
What the free tier actually includes
- $200 one-time credit
- Pay-as-you-go afterwards, per minute
- Concurrency limits are lower than on Growth and Enterprise
Where the wall is
The end of the credit. Because the per-minute price is low, the wall arrives late — but a product that transcribes all day reaches it, and Growth starts at $4,000 a year.
After that: Pay-as-you-go Nova-3: $0.0043 a minute pre-recorded, $0.0048 streaming on promotion ($0.0077 regular). Growth from $4K+ a year in prepaid credits (streaming $0.0042, regular $0.0065). Enterprise via sales.
Can you self-host Deepgram? No — cloud only
Deepgram is an API. Whisper, Vosk and faster-whisper are the open speech-to-text models compared here, and they run on your own hardware.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
When paying is still the right call
Stay for real-time streaming at production quality, which is the one place the managed services still hold a clear lead — sub-second interim results with good accuracy is genuinely hard to reproduce yourself. Stay if your volume is low, because at a few hours a month the bill is smaller than the electricity to run a GPU. Stay if you need broad language coverage with consistent quality and have no appetite for evaluating models per language. And stay while nobody on the team wants to own a GPU. If your volume is steady, your archive is large, or your recordings cannot leave the building, the case below is strong.
What you are locked into
Very low — the lowest in this batch. Transcription is stateless: audio in, text out. There is no accumulated state to migrate and no schema to rebuild. The integration is one API call, and several of the alternatives below expose a compatible server interface. What differs is output formatting and the shape of diarization results, so budget a day of parsing adjustments rather than a project.
If you would rather not pay: faster-whisper
faster-whisper
Whisper, several times faster, on less memory. The practical default.
Free. Hardware you already own; a laptop handles the smaller models.
What will the GPU cost? Compare every company’s hourly price
See all 5 Deepgram alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Read from Deepgram's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-24 — 27 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.