Amazon Transcribe $0.006 per minute vs Sume STT reservation

Amazon Transcribe's pricing page lists batch transcription at $0.006 per minute in the US East (N. Virginia) region, billed in one-second increments with no minimum. Sume STT 1.0 is $0.01 per audio minute. Amazon is cheaper at list price, and its volume tiers go lower.

The practical difference for short clips is how the amount is reserved: Sume reserves one minute when you omit duration_seconds, so a 10-second clip should send a hint.

Published figures

Amazon's figures are for the first pricing tier in one region as printed on its page; other regions and features differ.

Make Sume reserve what you need

Pass duration_seconds between 1 and 600 so the reservation matches the clip. The cap is per request, so split recordings longer than ten minutes before you submit.

import os, requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/stt-1.0/transcribe",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SUME_API_KEY']}",
             "Idempotency-Key": "stt-demo-001"},
    json={"audio_url": "https://example.com/call.mp3",
          "language_code": "en",
          "duration_seconds": 300},
)
print(r.status_code, r.json())

Which to pick

For a very large archive of plain transcripts inside AWS, Amazon's per-second billing and tiers are hard to beat on price. For transcripts that feed other Sume steps (captions, dubbing, timeline audio), the single job model avoids moving files between clouds.

Neither number is a quality comparison; run a sample of your own audio through both.

Worked example

A one-hour archive and a 20-second clip show the difference between the two billing approaches.

• 100 hours at $0.006 per minute: Amazon $36.00 versus Sume $60.00.
• A 20-second clip: Amazon bills 20 seconds (about $0.002). Sume reserves one minute ($0.01) if duration_seconds is omitted, so send the hint.
• Amazon's tiers (38% off the next 750,000 minutes, 58% beyond 1M) matter only at very large volume.

Checklist before you commit

Amazon's printed rate is for one region and its first tier. If you run outside US East (N. Virginia), read your own region's page.

• Check for an AWS-only data requirement before comparing prices.
• Check that your clips fit inside 600 seconds, or split them first.
• Compare accuracy on your own audio, not just price.