Amazon Transcribe pricing calculator
Standard, Call Analytics & Medical. Estimate your costs using AWS list prices.
Estimates from AWS list prices, not an AWS quote. Discounts, taxes and credit terms may affect your bill.
01 · How Amazon Transcribe pricing works
What you pay for
- Per second of audio (15-second minimum per request): batch $0.006/min and streaming $0.010002/min for the first tier in us-east-1, tiered down by volume.
- Add-ons per minute: PII redaction, custom language models, toxicity detection.
- Call Analytics ($0.03/min first tier, plus generative summaries) and Transcribe Medical are priced separately.
Common cost traps
- Short clips are billed at least 15 seconds each.
- Add-ons stack: redaction plus custom models can nearly double the per-minute price.
- Medical and Call Analytics rates are 5-12x standard transcription.
Ways to reduce cost
- Concatenate very short clips where possible.
- Use batch rather than streaming when you do not need live results.
- Enable redaction and custom models only for audio that needs them.
Free Tier & account eligibility
Free Tier depends on account age. Accounts created on or after 15 July 2025 get a $100 sign-up credit plus up to $100 more for completing onboarding activities; on the Free plan these last 6 months (or until used up), on the Paid plan unused Free Tier credits stay usable for 12 months from sign-up. Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy Free Tier (12-month offers plus always-free offers). Always-free offers apply on both plans. Legacy accounts: 60 minutes per month of standard transcription for 12 months (plus small Call Analytics and Medical allowances). New-plan accounts pay from Free Tier credits.
02 · AWS credits & runway
Do credits cover Amazon Transcribe?
Transcribe batch and streaming transcription, Call Analytics, Medical, redaction, custom language models and toxicity detection are eligible usage and are offset by credits. General rules: credits only offset charges from the billing cycle in which they were applied onward (never past bills), they apply only to the services listed on the credit in Billing and Cost Management > Credits, they expire on the date shown there, and accounts on the AWS Free plan cannot receive Activate credits until they upgrade to the Paid plan.
Check my creditsExcluded charges & conditions
- Upfront payments for Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (All Upfront, and the upfront part of Partial Upfront). The recurring hourly fee of a No Upfront commitment is billed as normal usage and can be offset.
- AWS Marketplace charges (Activate credits make an exception for third-party foundation models used through Amazon Bedrock).
- AWS Enterprise Support, Enterprise On-Ramp, Unified Operations, resold support and partner-led support.
- Amazon Route 53 domain name registration and transfer fees.
- Taxes (sales, use, VAT and similar), AWS Professional Services, Training and Certification, Mechanical Turk, AWS Managed Services, and any use for cryptocurrency mining.
Illustrative credit runway
Single-service examples from the supplied data, not your calculator result. Months = credit amount ÷ monthly cost, before credit expiry. Credits can expire before these theoretical months are used; coverage and other AWS services can shorten runway.
| Usage profile | Monthly estimate | $10,000 | $25,000 | $100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small | $12.00 | 833.3 mo. | 2,083.3 mo. | 8,333.3 mo. |
| Medium | $520.02 | 19.2 mo. | 48.1 mo. | 192.3 mo. |
| Large | $6,480.00 | 1.5 mo. | 3.9 mo. | 15.4 mo. |
Small profile assumptions
2,000 minutes of batch transcription | Batch transcription (AWS Price List offer transcribe): 2,000 minutes x $0.006 = $12.00 | Total ~$12.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Medium profile assumptions
50,000 batch minutes with PII redaction, 10,000 streaming minutes | Batch transcription (AWS Price List offer transcribe): 50,000 minutes x $0.006 = $300.00; Content redaction: 50,000 minutes x $0.0024 = $120.00; Streaming transcription: 10,000 minutes x $0.010002 = $100.02 | Total ~$520.02/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
Large profile assumptions
200,000 minutes of post-call Call Analytics with generative summaries | Call Analytics post-call: 200,000 minutes x $0.03 = $6,000.00; Generative call summaries: 200,000 minutes x $0.0024 = $480.00 | Total ~$6,480.00/month, us-east-1 on-demand list prices, before Free Tier, taxes and support.
04 · Questions
Amazon Transcribe pricing FAQ
How is audio measured?
Per second, with a minimum of 15 seconds per request; prices are quoted per minute.
Batch or streaming?
Batch is cheaper ($0.006 vs about $0.010 per minute here) if you can wait for results.
Is Call Analytics included?
No, it is priced separately at $0.03 per minute for the first tier.
Do credits cover Transcribe?
Yes, it is eligible usage.
05 · Sources & estimate notes
Content pack dated 2026-10-19. Calculator rates remain their existing snapshots; this content update is not a price refresh.
Verification notes
- Standard batch rate ($0.006/min) was confirmed against the AWS Price List offer "transcribe" (0.0001 per second).
- Runway prices come from the calculator repository snapshot rate card transcribe (no AWS Price List mapping in the build). Confirm the main unit prices on https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/pricing/ before publishing.