> Deepgram
Deepgram sells speech-to-text, text-to-speech and voice-agent APIs on pay-as-you-go terms with a $200 free credit and no credit card required at sign-up. Speech-to-text is billed per minute: Nova-3 is $0.0043/min pre-recorded monolingual and $0.0052/min multilingual (about $0.29 and $0.35 per hour streaming), while Flux for real-time agents is $0.0065/min English and $0.0078/min multilingual under limited-time promotional rates. Text-to-speech runs from $0.0150/1k characters (Aura-1) to $0.0450/1k characters (Flux TTS), and the Voice Agent API starts at $0.050/min.
// pros
- The free tier is a $200 credit with no credit card required, described on the pricing page as having no minimums and no expiration, rather than a short trial window.
- Concurrency ceilings are published per API: up to 50 REST or 150 WebSocket speech-to-text streams, 45 TTS streams, 45 Voice Agent sessions and 10 Audio Intelligence REST requests on pay-as-you-go.
- The prepaid annual Growth plan reduces rates by roughly 12.5% with credits redeemed against actual usage (for example Nova-3 monolingual streaming $0.0042/min versus $0.0048) and raises WebSocket speech-to-text concurrency to 225.
- Add-on pricing is granular enough to model: redaction $0.0020/min, keyterm prompting $0.0013/min, entity detection $0.0017/min, smart formatting included, with speaker diarization billed at $0.0020/min on streaming and included on pre-recorded.
- Compliance posture is stated on the same page: SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, HIPAA Business Associate Agreements for Enterprise customers handling ePHI, GDPR compliance with a dedicated EU endpoint (api.eu.deepgram.com), plus CCPA and PCI.
// cons
- Several streaming rates are flagged as limited-time promotional pricing with higher regular prices shown alongside, such as Flux English at $0.0065/min against a regular $0.0077/min and Nova-3 Monolingual at $0.0048/min against a regular $0.0077/min.
- Custom speech-to-text models are sales-gated with no published rate, and Voice Agent tiers span more than 3x in price ($0.050/min for Custom BYO LLM + TTS to $0.163/min for Advanced), so architecture choices drive cost.
- Audio Intelligence is metered per token on top of transcription minutes (summarization $0.0003 per 1k input tokens to $0.0006 per 1k output tokens), and Topic Detection, Sentiment Analysis and Intent Recognition are listed without standalone prices.
- Text-to-speech is priced per 1,000 characters rather than per audio minute, which makes long, slowly spoken scripts disproportionately more expensive than dense ones.
Pick Deepgram when transcription or a real-time voice agent is the core requirement and published per-minute rates plus explicit concurrency caps are worth more than model breadth. Spend the $200 credit on pay-as-you-go first, then move to prepaid Growth only once annual volume is predictable.
written by Mike Fleming, Uprouter editorial · verified against official sources September 16, 2026
Value taken from the provider’s own published free-tier terms, expressed in USD.
note: $200 free credit on the Pay As You Go plan, stated on deepgram.com/pricing as 'Free $200 Credit then pay-as-you-go' with 'No credit card required' and 'No minimums. No expiration.'
| Plan | Type | Monthly | Input /1M | Output /1M | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nova-3 Monolingual (STT) | payg | — | $80.00 | — | Billed at $0.0048/minute; estimated 1M tokens ≈ 1000 minutes (basis: 150 wpm * 5 chars/word ≈ 750 tokens/min). |
| Flux TTS | payg | — | $45.00 | — | Billed at $0.0450 per 1k characters. |
| Free credit | free | — | — | — | $200 free API credit; no minimums, no expiration, no credit card required |
| Nova-3 Monolingual (pay-as-you-go) | payg | — | — | — | $0.0048/min STT; Growth plan $0.0042/min |
| Nova-3 Multilingual (pay-as-you-go) | payg | — | — | — | $0.0058/min STT; Growth $0.0050/min |
| Aura-2 TTS (pay-as-you-go) | payg | — | $30.00 | — | $0.030 per 1k characters = $30 per 1M characters |
| Aura-1 TTS (pay-as-you-go) | payg | — | $15.00 | — | $0.0150 per 1k characters = $15 per 1M characters |
| Flux TTS (pay-as-you-go) | payg | — | $45.00 | — | $0.0450 per 1k characters = $45 per 1M characters after 2026-09-14 promo (free until then) |
| Growth (annual, prepaid) | subscription | — | — | — | $4K+/year with pre-paid credits redeemed against usage; higher concurrency and discounted rates |
Pricing normalized from public sources — always verify with the provider.
// model prices
| Model | Input /1M | Output /1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nova-3 | — | — | — |
| Flux STT | — | — | — |
| Aura-2 TTS | — | — | — |
| Aura-1 TTS | — | — | — |
| Flux TTS | — | — | — |
| Deepgram Whisper Cloud | — | — | — |
| Nova-3 | — | — | — |
| Nova-2 | — | — | — |
| Aura-2 | — | — | — |
$ Does Deepgram have a free tier?
Yes — Deepgram offers a free tier that we value at roughly $200.00 in free credits. Always confirm current limits on Deepgram's official pricing page — free tiers change without notice.
$ How much does Deepgram cost per 1M tokens?
Deepgram does not publish simple per-1M-token pricing (it may bill per request, per output, or via a subscription plan). Check their official pricing page for exact figures.
$ Is Deepgram safe to use?
Uprouter rates Deepgram as low risk. Low risk: first-party from a named voice-AI company, and the free grant is unusually explicit — "$200 Credit, then pay-as-you-go … No credit card required. No minimums. No expiration" (official pricing page, verified 2026-09-16). The exposure is post-credit: the API is paid-only once the $200 is spent, and voice workloads (per-second metering) can exhaust it faster than token workloads do. Risk ratings are editorial, evidence-based, and never influenced by affiliate relationships.
Raw community sentiment, shown unblended. Votes never feed into objective data fields like price, risk, or status — and never into sort order.
No published reviews yet — be the first.
// more_informationprice history · live status · risk & confidence · code snippets
price_history
No recorded changes yet.
live_status
current: unknownNo probes recorded yet.
Uprouter runs its own probes; best-effort, not a guarantee. Probe results depend on our network location and cadence — for production, always use the provider’s own status page.
risk_&_confidence
Low risk: first-party from a named voice-AI company, and the free grant is unusually explicit — "$200 Credit, then pay-as-you-go … No credit card required. No minimums. No expiration" (official pricing page, verified 2026-09-16). The exposure is post-credit: the API is paid-only once the $200 is spent, and voice workloads (per-second metering) can exhaust it faster than token workloads do.
Confidence reflects how much verifiable evidence (official docs, probe history, community reports) backs this entry. Risk is our editorial assessment of operator reliability and terms — not financial advice.
code_snippets
# Deepgram's own API — get a key from their dashboard
curl https://deepgram.com/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer THEIR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "deepgram/nova-3",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Hello" }]
}'Direct to the provider — Uprouter receives nothing; verify their current pricing before purchasing.
Ranked by neutral similarity signals only — live status, free-tier shape and free-credit proximity. Commercial relationships never influence this list.