Otter Pro 1,200 minutes at $16.99 vs Sume STT at $0.01 a minute

Otter Pro costs $16.99 per user per month for 1,200 monthly minutes, which is about $0.0142 a minute. Sume's speech-to-text is $0.01 a minute, so 1,200 minutes is $12.00 with no subscription. Otter is an app for meetings; Sume STT is an API job that returns a transcript with word timings. They solve different problems, and the price only matters if you want transcripts without the app. Otter also lists a lower annual-billing price; check its page, because this post compares monthly billing only.

Otter's figures come from its pricing page, read on 2026-10-03. Per-minute prices are my division.

The Otter plans

The page lists these monthly allowances and limits.

Per-minute arithmetic

Pro at $16.99 for 1,200 minutes is $0.0142 a minute, so Sume at $0.01 is cheaper per minute. If you transcribe 20 one-hour meetings (1,200 minutes), Sume is $12.00 against $16.99 a month on Otter on monthly billing.

Other numbers on the page matter more than the unit price. Pro also lists 10 file imports a month, so a team that uploads files rather than recording in the app would hit that before the minutes. Sume STT has no per-month file count in the docs; it has a 600-second cap on each job.

A five-person team

If five people each use their 1,200 minutes, Otter Pro costs 5 x $16.99 = $84.95 a month on monthly billing. Sume would charge 6,000 minutes x $0.01 = $60.00, and carries none of the collaboration features. The page I read does not say whether minutes pool across users, so this assumes each user stays under their own allowance. Annual billing on Otter is cheaper than monthly, so compare against the current annual price before deciding.

What Sume does and does not do

Sume gives you the transcript and nothing around it. It does not join meetings, take notes in an app or share a workspace link; the output is a JSON result you read after the job completes. A one-hour meeting is six jobs of up to 10 minutes. See splitting long recordings for how to stitch word timings.

Speech to text on Sume is $0.01 per minute of audio, up to 600 seconds per job.

• Good fit: pulling transcripts into your own tool or into captions for video.
• Poor fit: a person wanting a meeting assistant with sharing and search.
• Same API: clip a quote from the transcript and render it as a caption video.