AssemblyAI has no ongoing free tier; what it offers is a credit grant that runs out. Speech-to-text and Speech Understanding API… Verified November 2026. Compare with 3 alternatives in AI / ML.

AssemblyAI Free Credits 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. Verified November 2026. Last updated 2026-11-12.

AssemblyAI has no ongoing free tier; what it offers is a credit grant that runs out: 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 89 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →

Tier

Free Credits

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 2026-11-12 from https://www.assemblyai.com/docs/billing-and-pricing, and our check recorded: the page names AssemblyAI as "assemblyai" and states "$50".

When AssemblyAI's Free Credits Run Out

When credits run out or expire, you must pay for further use.
At that point, the 3 alternatives in AI / ML are each listed with the free tier they offer, so you can compare what they give you against what you have outgrown.

Pricing Change History (0 recorded)

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

View all 513 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
Google Gemini API	Free (Reduced) Free tier: Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.1 Flash-Lite, Gemini 3 Flash Preview, Gemini Embedding 2 and Gemma 4 are free of charge. Also free of charge are Gemini 3.8 Live (real-time voice), Gemini 3.5 Live Translate (translation), Gemini 3.5 Transcribe…	stable
Cohere	Free AI model API for Command chat models, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse. Every account starts with a Trial API key: calls made with it are free and limited to 1,000 API calls a month.	stable
Deepgram	Free Credits Speech-to-text and text-to-speech API — $200 free credits on signup (no credit card required), ~43K minutes transcription with Nova model, credits never expire. Access to all model endpoints Deepgram's docs say only data included through its Model Improvement Partnership Program is stored and used for future model training. Adding mip_opt_out=true to a request excludes it, and opted-out request data is kept only while the request is processed. (From developers.deepgram.com/docs/the-deepgram-model-improvement-partnership-program, read 2026-10-23.) Nova-3 speech-to-text allows up to 50 concurrent pre-recorded requests and up to 150 concurrent streaming requests. (From developers.deepgram.com/reference/api-rate-limits, read 2026-10-23.) A transcription request without enough credits fails with HTTP 402 Payment Required, with the message "Project does not have enough credits for an ASR request and does not have an overage agreement." (From developers.deepgram.com/docs/errors, read 2026-10-23.) Rate limits apply per project, not per account or API key. Creating additional projects under the same account does not grant additional concurrency. Secondary projects on a self-serve account are limited to a single concurrent stream. Using additional projects or accounts to work around the limits is detected and violates Deepgram's Terms of Service. (From developers.deepgram.com/reference/api-rate-limits, read 2026-11-07.) Deepgram's terms, section 2.4, forbid use of the Services or any Output "for competitive purposes, including model training, benchmarking and other competitive analysis, or developing competing models, products or services". (From deepgram.com/terms, read 2026-11-07.) Deepgram's terms, section 2.4, prohibit resale or redistribution of the Services on a stand-alone basis. Integration into the user's own Application is allowed when the Application contributes material independent functionality beyond Deepgram's Services. (From deepgram.com/terms, read 2026-11-07.)	stable

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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: 2026-11-14
query_key: alternatives:AI / ML:AssemblyAI
seed: a9f1e7918b4f7c150c098dbb17b393898872889b0ed8239078edb539999e4de4
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 →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AssemblyAI free?

No. What AssemblyAI offers is a credit grant that runs out: 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...

Is AssemblyAI's free offer reliable?

AssemblyAI's free offer is considered stable.

Is AssemblyAI's free offer good for production?

Not for long. It is a credit grant that runs out, so plan for paid usage before you depend on it.

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.

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.