gpt-transcribe at $0.0045 a minute vs Scribe v2 and Nova-3

Among the three in the title, the cheapest listed price for completed recordings is ElevenLabs Scribe v2 at $0.22 an hour. Deepgram's pre-recorded Nova-3 mono is $0.258 an hour, and OpenAI's gpt-transcribe at $0.0045 a minute is $0.27 an hour. The spread is small, about 23% from lowest to highest of the three, so features and accuracy on your audio matter more than the rate.

Per-minute and per-hour prices

Per-hour figures are the listed per-minute price times 60, or the listed hourly price. OpenAI marks some rates with a tilde, which I copy.

Which OpenAI model for which job

OpenAI's transcription guide separates the models by job, which affects the price you actually pay.

• gpt-transcribe: completed recordings.
• gpt-live-transcribe: live streams, $0.017 a minute, so about 3.8 times the price of gpt-transcribe (0.017 / 0.0045).
• gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize: required for speaker labels.
• whisper-1: timestamps, subtitle formats and translation to English.
• Prompts, keywords and language hints improve accuracy.

Cost of 10 hours of audio

Arithmetic on the per-hour column. If you need subtitles or speaker labels, the model that provides them sets your price, not the cheapest row.

What Sume bills

Sume's Video inspect can transcribe the audio of a clip you already host with transcribe: true. The public rate is $0.01 per audio minute, which is $0.60 an hour. That is well above the $0.22 an hour listed for Scribe v2, and the Sume docs do not break the $0.01 down against any vendor's list price. Each inspect also bills its own compute on top of the transcript line, so the all-in clip price is higher still.

It is a clip tool, not a bulk-transcription API: it reads one Sume-hosted clip per job, reserves one minute unless you pass duration_seconds (up to 600), and accepts a language_code hint such as ko. Sume does not offer gpt-transcribe or Deepgram. For a backlog of long recordings, a dedicated STT API is cheaper on the listed numbers; for transcripts attached to video you already process in Sume, the flat $0.01 a minute is simple to budget.