Deepgram
Verified Oct 15, 2026 ActiveLow-latency speech recognition and voice agent API
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $0.0043/min
- Billing
- Metered · per minute
Pay As You Go starts with a $200 credit, no card and no expiry. Nova-3 speech-to-text is $0.0043 per minute pre-recorded and $0.0048 streaming in English ($0.0052 and $0.0058 multilingual), with streaming rates marked as limited-time promotional; Aura-2 text-to-speech is $0.030 per 1,000 characters and Flux TTS $0.045; the Voice Agent API runs $0.050 to $0.163 per connected minute by tier. Growth is a prepaid annual commitment from $4,000 with rates 10–20% lower; Enterprise is quoted.
Use tool ↗About Deepgram
Deepgram sells speech APIs to developers: streaming and batch speech-to-text on its Nova-3 and Flux models, Aura text-to-speech, audio intelligence such as summaries and sentiment, and a Voice Agent API that bundles listening, an LLM turn and speaking over one WebSocket. It is built for contact centres, meeting tools and voice agents where latency and per-minute cost matter more than a consumer interface. Billing is pay-as-you-go from a $200 starting credit, with prepaid annual Growth contracts from $4,000 and enterprise terms for self-hosted deployment. The company, Deepgram, Inc., is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2015.
- Platforms
- API
- API
- Yes
- Last verified
- Oct 15, 2026
Verified sources
- Pricing page: Pay As You Go with $200 free credit, no minimums and no expiry; Nova-3 pre-recorded $0.0043 per minute and streaming $0.0048 per minute (English) at pay-as-you-go rates, Aura-2 text-to-speech $0.030 per 1,000 characters, Voice Agent API $0.075 per minute standard; Growth from $4K per year prepaid, Enterprise by contact (15 October 2026)deepgram.com ↗
- About page: founded in 2015, CEO and co-founder Scott Stephenson, products listed as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, Voice Agent and Audio Intelligence APIs, $130M Series C at a $1.3B valuation (15 October 2026)deepgram.com ↗
- Terms name the operator as Deepgram, Inc. at 548 Market St, San Francisco, CA, under California law (15 October 2026)deepgram.com ↗
Is Deepgram legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Jan 28, 2016 (10 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar Amazon Registrar, Inc., looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Let's Encrypt, valid until Nov 29, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 15, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 15, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2015The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- Deepgram, Inc., United StatesOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of Deepgram
Deepgram is the pick when you are building the pipeline yourself and the per-minute number matters: streaming Nova-3 at under half a cent a minute, published rates for every model and mode, and a $200 credit that does not expire make it easy to size a bill before signing anything. It is an API, not a product — there is no transcription app to hand to a non-developer, and the voice agent tier is priced per connected minute, so idle sessions cost money.
Pros
- Rates are public down to a fraction of a cent, per model and per mode
- $200 starting credit with no card and no expiry is enough to benchmark seriously
- Streaming and batch share one API, and the Voice Agent API saves wiring STT, LLM and TTS together
- Founded 2015 and Series C funded, with self-hosted deployment on enterprise terms
Cons
- Streaming rates are marked as limited-time promotional, so the published number may rise
- Voice Agent minutes are billed on WebSocket connection time, including silence
- Growth pricing starts at a $4,000 annual prepay, with nothing between pay-as-you-go and that
Best for
- Engineering teams building real-time transcription or voice agents who want published per-minute rates
- Contact-centre and meeting products with enough audio volume for the Growth discount to justify a prepaid year
- Developers who want speech-to-text, text-to-speech and an agent runtime from one vendor and one key
Not for
- Anyone who wants a transcription app rather than an API
- Small projects that would rather pay a flat subscription than track per-minute usage
Watch out: The Voice Agent API is metered on connection time, not speech, so an agent left open on a call keeps billing while nobody talks — close sessions promptly.
Alternatives to Deepgram
Deepgram head-to-head
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