Transcription without a subscription

Buy minutes, spend them when you actually have something to transcribe, and stop when you don’t. That’s the entire pricing model: no plan tier to pick, no seat to manage, and the first 30 minutes are free before you spend anything.

How pay-as-you-go works

You buy a prepaid minute pack and spend it on transcription; speaker labels, the editor, tags, and exports are part of that spend, not billed separately. There’s no subscription to start, and nothing to remember to cancel. Buy a pack when you need one; if you don’t transcribe anything for a while, you simply don’t buy another.

What a real transcript costs

Take a typical 2-hour interview, 120 minutes of audio, and run it through each pack:

• The $1.99 starter holds 45 minutes, so it can’t cover the interview alone; you’d need three of them ($5.97) just to have enough balance, which is worse value than stepping up a tier.
• The $5.99 pack with 5 h (300 min) covers it in one purchase: the interview draws about $2.40 worth of that pack, leaving roughly 180 minutes in your balance for whatever you transcribe next.
• The $11.99 pack with 15 h (900 min) covers it for about $1.60 of the purchase, banking 780 minutes.
• The $19.99 pack with 30 h (1,800 min) covers it for about $1.33, banking 1,680 minutes.

Buy once, and the leftover minutes do not reset at the end of the month. They carry forward between projects; a completed transcription or minute purchase resets the 180-day inactivity window.

Cheaper than a subscription, if you don’t transcribe every day

Compare that to a typical $20-a-month transcription subscription: $240 a year, whether you transcribe ten minutes or a hundred hours in any given month. Pay-as-you-go scales with what you actually use instead. Transcribe about 24 hours a year (two hour-long calls a month) and a single $19.99 pack covers the whole year, a twelfth of the subscription price. Transcribe 60 hours a year and two of the largest packs ($39.98) cover it. Even at 200 hours a year, a genuinely heavy caseload, seven packs ($139.93) still costs less than the $240 subscription, and none of it was spent on months you didn’t use. The gap holds because pack minutes do not reset every month: they carry forward, and completing a transcription or buying minutes resets the 180-day inactivity window.

The workflow is included

Minutes buy the whole workflow, not just raw text: free automatic speaker labels, the transcript editor, tags, saved dictionaries and prompt presets, merged uploads for related recordings, and every export format are part of the base price, none of it an upsell. After a transcript exists, you can optionally choose Generate Insights. One free run creates the complete result against the current transcript revision, including summaries, actions, decisions, open questions, quotes, chapters, speaker topics, subject clusters, export suggestions, terminology and profanity findings, and cleanup. Review cleanup in Edit and apply only the changes you approve.

Thirty free minutes to start

Hushscript isn’t free to run (transcription is paid, top-tier AI), but every new account gets 30 free minutes unlocked by card verification (temporary $1 hold, released immediately, never charged), then pay as you go. Prefer a different payment method? The 30 minutes land with your first purchase instead, and a card isn’t required.

Batch without a plan allowance

There is no plan-based files-per-day or monthly allowance. Recordings can run up to 10 hours, with no file-size limit – large video and audio are prepared right in the browser. High service-safety and active-job safeguards apply. Stage several recordings and start them together or one at a time; batching does not change the per-minute price.

No subscription, clear carry-over terms

Nothing recurring, nothing to remember to cancel. Unused minutes carry forward instead of resetting every month. They expire after 180 days without a completed transcription or minute purchase; either activity resets the window, and we send reminders before expiry.