Rev AI Whisper (English) $0.005 a minute, foreign $0.30 an hour

Rev AI's pay-as-you-go page lists Whisper Large (English) at $0.005 a minute ($0.30 an hour) and Reverb Foreign Language at $0.30 an hour, against $0.60 an hour for Sume STT. Rev's English Reverb at $0.20 an hour is already compared in our Reverb post; this page covers the other two models and the add-ons.

Numbers are from Rev AI's pricing page, read 2026-10-03. Hourly figures are my multiplication.

Rev's rates

Rev says new users receive free credits equal to 5 hours of Reverb ASR, usable across products, and that pricing rounds up to the nearest second with a 15-second minimum.

Foreign language and the language hint

A foreign-language hour is $0.30 on Rev and $0.60 on Sume, a 2.0 times difference. Sume uses the same $0.01 per minute for every language and takes an optional language code; omit it to auto-detect. On Rev, language identification is listed as a separate $0.003 a minute product, so detecting the language on a mixed batch adds $0.18 an hour.

Volume example

For 100 hours of foreign-language audio a month, Rev Reverb Foreign Language is $30 and Sume is $60. The extra $30 is the cost of staying inside a single API. If the audio is also being captioned, dubbed or cut into clips, that integration may be worth it; if it is transcription alone, Rev is cheaper.

Volume table

The prices are linear, so volume comparisons are simple multiplication. Rev's 15-second minimum and round-up-to-the-second billing only matter for short clips.

What Sume does and does not do

Sume does not translate text in the STT job, does not offer a human-transcription tier and caps each job at 600 seconds. Word timings are always returned.

Sume text to speech is $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, each quote rounded up to whole cents, up to 20,000 characters or 1,200 seconds of audio per request. Speech to text is $0.01 per minute of audio, up to 600 seconds per job.