Disclosure: I'm one of the two people behind WhoScribe, an AI transcription tool. This post is about our pricing decision and when you should use something else instead of us.
The problem we kept seeing
Most people who need a transcript don't need one every week. They have one long recording: a 3-hour lecture, a council meeting, a sermon, a podcast episode, an interview for a thesis. Most transcription tools are sold as monthly subscriptions, so the person with one recording either pays for a month they won't use or cuts the file into pieces to fit a free tier.
Our own numbers pushed us further. Of the files people paid to unlock on WhoScribe, most were longer than an hour, and buyers decided within a few minutes of seeing their transcript. They wanted the whole file, once.
What we built
- Paste a YouTube link or upload a file of up to 10 hours. The audio itself is transcribed, so videos without captions work.
- 90+ spoken languages, a timestamp on every line, exports to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT and VTT.
- You read the start for free first: 5 minutes without an account, 15 minutes with a free account.
- Then one payment unlocks the whole file, whatever its length. There is also a 3-file pack for a short series, and an Unlimited plan for people who transcribe every week.
When you should NOT use us
Being honest here is the point of this post:
- You transcribe a lot, every week. A subscription (ours or another tool's) will be cheaper per file than paying once each time.
- You're on a Mac and have time. A local Whisper app runs on your own machine. It's slower on long files and uses your battery, but nothing leaves your computer.
- You need live meeting notes. Meeting bots that join Zoom or Meet are built for that; we work on recordings after the fact.
- You need human-verified accuracy for legal or medical use. Automatic transcripts, ours included, can misspell names and terms. Use a human service or proofread.
What surprised us
- We changed one sentence from "full video up to 2 hours" to "the whole video, whatever its length". In the first days after the change, the share of people with long files who paid roughly doubled. People don't buy minutes, they buy their file.
- A lot of our visitors come from ChatGPT. When people ask it to transcribe a long YouTube video, it usually asks for the audio or a transcript, because it works from text. So the workflow that actually works is: get the transcript first, then bring the text to the chat assistant.
Try it on your own file
If you have one long recording sitting around, paste it into whoscribe.ai and read the first part for free. If our pricing doesn't fit how you work, one of the options above probably does, and I'd rather you use that.
Questions about how we built it (Laravel, queue workers, chunked transcription for 10-hour files) are welcome in the comments.
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