What transcription should cost

This is Talk Type, from the team at Pepys, where we turn talk into text.

Transcription pricing is a mess to compare, because tools don't price the same way. One charges per minute. One charges a monthly subscription. One is free until it suddenly isn't. So before you look at any number, it helps to understand the shapes, because the right price depends entirely on how you actually use it.

The oldest model is per minute of audio, and it's how human transcription is priced. You pay for exactly what you transcribe. Clean and fair, but it can get expensive on volume, especially with a person doing the work.

Then there's the subscription, which is where most software landed. You pay a flat monthly fee for some amount of transcription. This is great if you transcribe steadily, every week, all year. But here's the catch a lot of people hit. Transcription is bursty. You get a batch of interviews, a season of episodes, one big project, and then quiet for a month. A subscription bills you through the quiet months too. So people end up doing the awkward dance. Subscribe, cram everything into one month, cancel.

Which is why pay-as-you-go exists, and why a lot of people prefer it for bursty work. You buy the minutes you need, you use them when you need them, and you're not paying rent on a tool you touch twice a year.

And then, free. Free tiers are real and useful, but read the edges. Free often means short files only, or a cap that's easy to hit, or your audio being used to train someone's model, which matters if the content is sensitive. Free is perfect for trying a tool on a real file before you commit. It's less perfect as the plan for a hundred hours of interviews.

So the honest way to shop. Don't ask what's cheapest in the abstract. Ask what's cheapest for your pattern. Steady heavy use, and a subscription might win. Bursty or occasional use, and pay-as-you-go usually wins, because you never pay for the quiet months. Match the pricing shape to how you actually work, and you stop overpaying.

That's this episode of Talk Type. The full write up, with the links and sources, is in the show notes. Pepys transcribes any file or link, any length, pay once, and we never train on your audio. Your first sixty minutes are free at pepys dot co. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.