Deepgram has no ongoing free tier; what it offers is a credit grant that runs out. Speech-to-text and text-to-speech API — $200 free credits on signup (no credit card required), ~43K… Verified October 2026. Compare with 3 alternatives in AI / ML.

Deepgram 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://deepgram.com/pricing, where it says: “Speech-to-Text (STT), Text-to-Speech (TTS), and Voice Agent APIs” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 3 alternatives. Verified October 2026. Last updated 2026-10-26.

Deepgram has no ongoing free tier; what it offers is a credit grant that runs out: Speech-to-text and text-to-speech API — $200 free credits on signup (no credit card required), ~43K minutes… We rate it stable. The one change we have recorded did not narrow the terms. 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 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

We read that on 2026-10-26 from https://deepgram.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Deepgram as "deepgram" and states "$200".

From deepgram.com/pricing, read 2026-10-26:

Price Free $200 Credit then pay-as-you-go

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.)
Pay as You Go allows up to 45 concurrent Voice Agent API connections. Aura and Aura-2 REST TTS allow 15 concurrent requests. Aura and Aura-2 streaming TTS allow 45 concurrent requests. Flux TTS REST allows 15 concurrent requests in North America and 5 in Europe, Australia and India. (From developers.deepgram.com/reference/api-rate-limits, read 2026-11-07.)
Deepgram offers a dedicated EU endpoint at api.eu.deepgram.com for data processing within the European Union. Pay as You Go limits apply to this endpoint, and also to api.au.deepgram.com and api.in.deepgram.com. (From deepgram.com/pricing, 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.)
Refund requests for unused credits purchased within the last 30 days go to consolebilling@deepgram.com. Deepgram reviews each account and processes eligible refunds. (From deepgram.com/pricing, read 2026-11-07.)
Self-hosted deployment through Amazon SageMaker requires only an AWS account. Deployment with Docker/Podman or Kubernetes requires a Deepgram Enterprise Plan. (From developers.deepgram.com/docs/self-hosted-introduction, read 2026-11-07.)
Deepgram on Amazon SageMaker is billed through AWS Marketplace. The monthly cost is the AWS charge for the instances that run the endpoint plus Deepgram's license charge for the audio or text processed. (From developers.deepgram.com/docs/amazon-sagemaker, read 2026-11-07.)

When Deepgram'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 (1 recorded)

new discovered 2026-08-28 · effective date unknown medium impact

No longer in force (2026-09-12). The $200 free credit is still offered, but the details have expanded. Text-to-Speech's Flux TTS is free until September 12, 2026, and Voice Agent API's Flux TTS is also free until September 12, 2026. No longer in force from 2026-09-12, the end date the record states for free Flux TTS. deepgram.com/pricing, read 2026-10-19, prices Flux TTS at $0.0450 per 1k characters on Pay As You Go and adds $1 in credits for every $1 spent on Flux TTS, up to $500, until December 31, 2026. The $200 free credit for new accounts is unchanged: Deepgram's FAQ says it is "available until you use it up". Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Deepgram's page, so it does not count toward the rating. Source ↗

Before: 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

After: Free $200 Credit then pay-as-you-go. Flux TTS is free until 9/12/2026. Voice Agent API's Flux TTS is free through September 12, 2026.

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How Deepgram 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
Deepgram	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
AssemblyAI	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.	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), Brave Search API (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), Google Colab (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), SerpApi (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 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), 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), Hetzner Inference API (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record), Valyu (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: 2026-11-14
query_key: alternatives:AI / ML:Deepgram
seed: 65f973631d7bdcfdae04c85656bb546e42a2402413e7640ed8e8e41b444848ed
tie_count: 2

Watch Deepgram 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=Deepgram
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=Deepgram

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Deepgram free?

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

Is Deepgram's free offer reliable?

Deepgram's free offer is considered stable. The one change we have recorded did not narrow the terms. See the pricing history below.

Is Deepgram'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 Deepgram's pricing?

Deepgram has had 1 recorded pricing change. Most recently: No longer in force (2026-09-12). The $200 free credit is still offered, but the details have expanded. Text-to-Speech's Flux TTS is free until September 12, 2026, and Voice Agent API's Flux TTS is also free until September 12, 2026. No longer in force from 2026-09-12, the end date the record states for free Flux TTS. deepgram.com/pricing, read 2026-10-19, prices Flux TTS at $0.0450 per 1k characters on Pay As You Go and adds $1 in credits for every $1 spent on Flux TTS, up to $500, until December 31, 2026. The $200 free credit for new accounts is unchanged: Deepgram's FAQ says it is "available until you use it up". Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Deepgram's page, so it does not count toward the rating. Source: https://deepgram.com/pricing (discovered 2026-08-28).

What are the best free alternatives to Deepgram?

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 Deepgram 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 Deepgram in?

Deepgram 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.