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AssemblyAI's base rate covers transcription only — speaker ID, sentiment, PII redaction and summarization all stack on top. Here is the real per-hour math.

AWS Transcribe's tiered per-minute rates, what the base price excludes, the hidden AWS costs around it, and when a flat-rate service is the saner choice.

Azure's $1/hour real-time and $0.36/hour batch rates look cheap until you add the surrounding Azure services. The real math, and when the lock-in is worth it.

Deepgram Nova-3 runs $0.0043/min batch and $0.0077/min streaming. The real decision is which you need — and whether you need a developer API at all.

Google's STT rate is fair and Chirp is included free — but the GCP pipeline around it (storage, functions, egress) is where the bill actually grows.

OpenAI's Whisper API costs $0.36/hour; self-hosting starts around $861/month all-in. Where the break-even really sits and who should choose what.