Deepgram Pricing 2026
Plans, hidden costs, and alternatives compared
Prices last confirmed on Oct 31, 2026 on deepgram.com. Same data as Markdown or JSON.
Cite this data: Toolradar, Deepgram pricing verified Oct 2026, toolradar.com/tools/deepgram/pricing
Deepgram starts at $4,000/year on the Growth plan.
Verified Oct 2026 from the official pricing page.
Is Deepgram worth the price?
Deepgram is the best-value speech AI platform for developers, and it is not close.
The $200 free credit with no expiration gives you ~43,000 minutes of Nova transcription to build and test with, more generous than any competitor. Nova-3 at $0.0077/minute ($0.46/hour) delivers accuracy rivaling OpenAI Whisper at roughly half the cost, with real-time streaming, speaker diarization, and 30+ languages.
The per-second billing is a genuine differentiator: competitors like AssemblyAI and AWS Transcribe round to the nearest second or 15-second increment, which inflates costs 5-15% on short audio clips. The Voice Agent API ($0.050-0.163/min depending on BYO components) positions Deepgram as a full voice AI stack, not just a transcription service.
Main caveat: the older Enhanced and Base models are more expensive than Nova while being less accurate, always use Nova-3 or Flux unless you have a specific legacy reason.
Pricing Plans
Free TrialPay As You Go
Free
Usage-based with $200 free credit (~43,000 minutes Nova transcription)
- $200 free credit (no expiration)
- No credit card required
- Nova-3 STT at $0.0077/min (mono) or $0.0092/min (multi)
- Nova-1/2 STT at $0.0058/min
- Flux STT at $0.0077/min
- Aura-2 TTS at $0.030/1K characters
- Aura-1 TTS at $0.015/1K characters
- Voice Agent API from $0.050/min
- 100 REST API concurrent connections
- 150 WebSocket concurrent connections
- Smart formatting included
- Speaker diarization at $0.002/min add-on
- PII redaction at $0.002/min add-on
- True per-second billing
Growth
$4,000/year (minimum)
Pre-paid credits with up to 20% savings and higher concurrency
- Up to 20% discount vs Pay As You Go
- Nova-3 STT at $0.0065/min (mono) or $0.0078/min (multi)
- Nova-1/2 STT at $0.0047/min
- Flux STT at $0.0065/min
- Aura-2 TTS at $0.027/1K characters
- Aura-1 TTS at $0.0135/1K characters
- Voice Agent API from $0.041/min
- 100 REST API concurrent connections
- 225 WebSocket concurrent connections
- Pre-paid credits redeemed against usage
- Higher concurrency limits
Enterprise
Custom
Custom pricing for large volumes, specific deployment, or support needs
- Custom volume pricing
- Custom concurrency limits
- Dedicated support
- Custom deployment options
- SLA guarantees
- On-premises available
Hidden Costs & Gotchas
Add-on features stack up
speaker diarization ($0.002/min) and PII redaction ($0.002/min) each add ~26% to the base Nova-3 price. A fully-featured transcription pipeline (Nova-3 + diarization + redaction + keyterm prompting) costs $0.0130/min vs $0.0077 base, a 69% premium.
Multilingual Nova-3 costs 19% more than monolingual ($0.0092/min vs $0.0077/min). If your audio is consistently in one language, always use the monolingual model to save.
The $200 free credit is not renewable, once spent, you are on metered billing.
Whisper Cloud (self-hosted Whisper model via Deepgram) is limited to 5 concurrent connections on all plans. If you need Whisper specifically at scale, you may need to self-host.
Growth plan requires a $4,000/year minimum commitment. Credits are pre-paid and redeemed against usage, if your usage drops, unused credits do not roll over (verify terms).
Audio Intelligence (summarization, sentiment, topics) uses a separate per-token pricing model ($0.0003-0.0006/1K tokens) that is difficult to estimate in advance since token count depends on audio content length and complexity.
How Deepgram compares
3 of 6 direct competitors offer a free plan.
| Tool | Starting price | Free plan |
|---|---|---|
| Deepgram | $4,000/year, billing unit not specified | Yes |
| AssemblyAI | From $0.15/hr | No |
| Whisper | $0.01/month, billing unit not specified | Yes |
| Google Gemini | $4.99/month flat for the whole organisation | Yes |
| Nuance DAX | $600/user/month | No |
| ElevenLabs | $5/month, billing unit not specified | Yes |
| Observe.ai | Contact sales | No |
Deepgram Pricing FAQ
How much does Deepgram cost?
Deepgram starts at $4,000/year on the Growth plan. A free plan is also available.
Does Deepgram have a free plan?
Yes. Deepgram offers a free plan called "Pay As You Go". It includes: $200 free credit (no expiration), No credit card required, Nova-3 STT at $0.0077/min (mono) or $0.0092/min (multi).
Does Deepgram offer a free trial?
Yes. Deepgram offers a free trial.
What are alternatives to Deepgram?
Alternatives to Deepgram include AssemblyAI, Whisper, Google Gemini, Nuance DAX. Whisper starts at $0.01/month, billing unit not specified; Google Gemini starts at $4.99/month flat for the whole organisation; Nuance DAX starts at $600/user/month.
Deepgram alternatives
Direct competitors. Starting prices match the table above.
Sources
- Official Deepgram pricing: deepgram.com/pricing (verified Oct 2026)
- Cite this data: Toolradar, Deepgram pricing verified Oct 2026, toolradar.com/tools/deepgram/pricing
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