AssemblyAI free tier includes Speech-to-text and Speech Understanding API… Catalogue date July 2026. Compare with 3 alternatives in AI / ML.

AssemblyAI Free Tier 2026 stable

Subtypes in AI / ML: speech_api — converts recorded or streamed speech to text, or text to speech. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://www.assemblyai.com/pricing, where it says: “Pre-recorded Speech-to-Text API” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 3 alternatives. Catalogue date July 2026. Last updated 2026-07-30.

AssemblyAI's free tier offers Speech-to-text and Speech Understanding API… It's stable — the change we last considered recording proposed removing a free tier the page still offers. Best for ai / ml workloads.

One of 83 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →
Tier
Free Credits
Category
Pricing Page
Catalogue date
2026-07-30
Last read
2026-07-30
The day we last read the vendor's page. We hold no confirmation of the terms we publish.

Free Tier Details

Speech-to-text and Speech Understanding API. New accounts get $50 in free credits with no credit card required; the credits do not expire and cover pre-recorded and streaming speech-to-text, the Voice Agent API, Speech Understanding and Guardrails, but not LLM Gateway. Free accounts can run 5 pre-recorded transcriptions in parallel and open 5 new streaming sessions per minute. Pay-as-you-go rates: Universal-3.5 Pro $0.21/hr; Universal-2 $0.15/hr; Universal-Streaming $0.15/hr; Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime $0.45/hr.

We read that on 2026-09-12 from https://www.assemblyai.com/docs/billing-and-pricing, and our check recorded: the page names AssemblyAI as "assemblyai". A source check reads the cited page for the service's name and a price; the limits above are from our own record.

When You'll Outgrow AssemblyAI's Free Tier

Pricing Change History (0 recorded)

No recorded pricing changes for AssemblyAI. This is a good sign — stable pricing.

View all 476 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How AssemblyAI compares against every one of the 3 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.

Service Free Tier Stability
AssemblyAI Free Credits stable
Cohere Free stable
Google Gemini API Free (Reduced) stable
Deepgram Free Credits stable

Left out of this list: Hugging Face (shares no subtype with this product), Groq (shares no subtype with this product), Mistral AI (shares no subtype with this product), OpenRouter (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare Workers AI (shares no subtype with this product), Cerebras (shares no subtype with this product), OpenAI (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Kaggle (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Baseten (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), Maxim AI (shares no subtype with this product), OCR.Space (shares no subtype with this product), Parseur (shares no subtype with this product), Reducto (shares no subtype with this product), Tavily AI (shares no subtype with this product), paperspace (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Keywords AI (shares no subtype with this product), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Lumenfall.ai (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), Pollinations.AI (shares no subtype with this product), Portkey (shares no subtype with this product), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), xAI (shares no subtype with this product), Anthropic API (shares no subtype with this product), GitHub Models (shares no subtype with this product), NVIDIA NIM (shares no subtype with this product), Ollama Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), LLM7.io (shares no subtype with this product), SiliconFlow (shares no subtype with this product), Zhipu AI (shares no subtype with this product), DeepSeek API (shares no subtype with this product), MiniMax (shares no subtype with this product), Exa (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), Together AI (shares no subtype with this product), Fireworks AI (shares no subtype with this product), Modal (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (we have not classified this record), Zep (we have not classified this record), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (we have not classified this record), Cognee (we have not classified this record), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), Jina AI (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.

See full comparison →

Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 3 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.
date
2026-09-30
query_key
alternatives:AI / ML:AssemblyAI
seed
69a2126c66be4d9d798e2dd76b2f65e52562cc41e1a161c5b09cef4f4648b21d
tie_count
2

Watch AssemblyAI for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=AssemblyAI curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=AssemblyAI

API docs →

Query via MCP

Look up AssemblyAI programmatically with the AgentDeals MCP server:

{ "tool": "search_deals", "arguments": { "query": "AssemblyAI", "limit": 5 } }

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AssemblyAI free?
Yes, AssemblyAI offers a free tier: Free Credits. Speech-to-text and Speech Understanding API. New accounts get $50 in free credits with no credit card required; the credits do not expire and cover pre-recorded and streaming speech-to-text, the Voice...
What is AssemblyAI's free tier?
AssemblyAI's free tier is called "Free Credits". Speech-to-text and Speech Understanding API. New accounts get $50 in free credits with no credit card required; the credits do not expire and cover pre-recorded and streaming speech-to-text, the Voice Agent API, Speech Understanding and Guardrails, but not LLM Gateway. Free accounts can run 5 pre-recorded transcriptions in parallel and open 5 new streaming sessions per minute. Pay-as-you-go rates: Universal-3.5 Pro $0.21/hr; Universal-2 $0.15/hr; Universal-Streaming $0.15/hr; Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime $0.45/hr.
Is AssemblyAI's free tier reliable?
AssemblyAI's free tier is considered stable.
Is AssemblyAI's free tier good for production?
AssemblyAI's free tier can be suitable for small production workloads and side projects. We rate it stable and it offers Speech-to-text and Speech Understanding API…, so it's a reasonable starting point. Monitor your usage against the limits and have an upgrade plan ready.
What changed in AssemblyAI's pricing?
The last change we considered recording for AssemblyAI proposed removing a free tier the page still offers, so we published none.
What are the best free alternatives to AssemblyAI?
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 3 free alternatives to AssemblyAI in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 2 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 1 is demoted with the reason named. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
When will I outgrow AssemblyAI's free tier?
When your usage exceeds the free tier limits, you'll need to upgrade. When you outgrow the free tier, evaluate paid plans against alternatives — sometimes a competitor's free tier covers what you need.
What category is AssemblyAI in?
AssemblyAI is categorized under AI / ML on AgentDeals. We list 3 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.

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