How much does Deepgram cost?

Deepgram charges by the amount of audio you send, not by seat or subscription. On pay as you go, its main model, Nova-3 Monolingual, lists at $0.258 per hour of recorded audio, which is $0.0043 per minute ¹. Live (streaming) audio costs more: $0.462 per hour at the regular rate ². Every new account starts with a $200 free credit ³.

These prices were read on Deepgram's pricing page on 27 October 2026. Deepgram lists prices per minute; the hourly figures here are the per-minute price times 60. Prices change, so confirm them before you budget.

Recorded audio costs $0.216 to $0.312 per hour

The price depends on whether you send a file or a live stream, whether the audio is in one language or several, and which plan you are on. For recorded files:

Multilingual audio, where speakers switch languages, costs about 21 percent more than single-language audio on pay as you go ⁸. For recorded files, speaker labels ( speaker diarization) and smart formatting are included in the model price.

Live audio costs more, and the cheaper rate is a promotion

Nova-3 Monolingual streaming lists at a regular $0.0077 per minute, with a current promotional rate of $0.0048 per minute ². Over an hour, the promotion works out to about $0.288 against $0.462 regular ⁹. The pricing page called the streaming rates "limited-time promotional" and showed no end date on the day we read it. Budget at the regular rate and treat the promotion as a discount you may lose.

Add-ons raise a streaming bill. Speaker diarization on live audio is an extra $0.0020 per minute ¹⁰, and Keyterm Prompting, which biases the model toward your product names and jargon, adds $0.0013 per minute ¹¹.

The free tier is a $200 balance, not a monthly allowance

The $200 credit is a one-time balance that then rolls into pay as you go ³. Spent on Nova-3 Monolingual recorded audio, it covers about 775 hours ¹². Live audio or multilingual audio uses it faster. That is enough to test several hundred hours of your own audio before paying anything.

The plans differ in commitment, not in the model

• Pay as you go: no minimum, no expiry and no credit card to start ¹³.
• Growth: a prepaid commitment of $4,000 or more a year, which cuts rates by up to 20 percent ¹³.
• Enterprise: custom pricing through sales, and the tier where Deepgram signs HIPAA business associate agreements ¹⁴.

It depends: when the real cost differs from the list price

• Live audio with extras. A voice agent that needs speaker labels and keyterms pays the model rate plus both add-ons, so price the whole bundle.
• Resellers. Cloud platforms resell the same model at their own rates. Cloudflare's Workers AI lists Nova-3 at $0.312 per hour ¹⁵. If you buy that way, the reseller's terms apply as well as Deepgram's.
• Rivals. AssemblyAI's Universal-3.5 Pro lists at $0.21 per hour, so Nova-3 costs about 1.23 times as much on recorded audio ¹⁶. See Deepgram vs AssemblyAI and how much AssemblyAI costs.

What to do

1. Sign up, take the $200 credit, and transcribe 30 to 60 minutes of your own audio with Nova-3.
2. Price your real monthly volume at the regular rates, with the add-ons you need.
3. Consider Growth only if your yearly spend will clearly pass $4,000.
4. If accuracy is your main worry, read how accurate Deepgram is before you decide.

For the full picture, including data retention and deployment options, see our guide to Deepgram and the wider overview of speech recognition. If you only want to dictate on your own computer, an API is the wrong tool: free browser dictation at /online-dictation or an on-device app avoids per-hour billing altogether.