Basic: the free plan
Basic gives you 300 transcription minutes a month, shared between meetings and imported files, with a 30-minute cap on each conversation. If you import a longer file, only the first 30 minutes of the transcript is available until you upgrade. File imports are limited to 3 for the lifetime of the account, not per month.
Otter keeps your 25 most recent conversations visible on Basic and archives older ones. Exports are TXT only, plus the MP3 audio, and AI Chat is limited to 20 questions a month. The meeting bot and speaker identification are included, which makes Basic a reasonable way to try Otter on your own calls. It is too small for transcribing a backlog of recordings.
Pro: $16.99 a month, or $8.33 billed annually
Pro costs $16.99 per user on monthly billing, or $8.33 per user a month billed annually, which Otter labels as a 51% saving. Each user gets 1,200 transcription minutes a month, and meetings and imported files draw from the same pool. File imports are capped at 10 a month per user, and Otter's pricing table lists a maximum of 90 minutes per conversation. Its help pages don't say outright whether that 90-minute cap applies to imported files.
Pro adds PDF, DOCX and SRT export, team vocabulary, taggable speakers and integrations with Zapier, Salesforce and HubSpot. Students and teachers with a .edu address get 20% off Pro: $79.99 billed annually ($6.67 a month) or $13.59 on monthly billing.
Business and Enterprise
Business costs $30 per user on monthly billing, and the pricing page showed $24 under a 20%-off promotion for the first 3 months. Billed annually it is $19.99 per user a month. Meetings and in-app recordings are unlimited. File imports are listed as unlimited too, but imported-file transcription is capped at 6,000 minutes per user per month. Conversations can run to 4 hours, Business adds bulk export and Dropbox import, and a workspace holds up to 25 billed users.
Enterprise has no published price; you book a demo. It is the only plan with API access and webhooks, and it has no cap on the number of users.
The catches to know before you pay
Otter's prices are fair for what it is built for, which is meeting notes. A few details matter if you are paying mainly to transcribe files.
- Prices are per user. A team of three on Pro pays three times the listed price.
- Unused minutes don't roll over to the next month.
- Imports are the tight limit: 3 per account on Basic and 10 a month on Pro, however short the files are.
- Otter transcribes 6 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.
- Otter can't import from a link. To transcribe a YouTube video you download it first or play it while Otter records.
- Otter has no human transcription option.
What an hour of transcription costs
If you mainly transcribe recordings, the useful number is the price per hour of audio. The figures below assume you use every minute you pay for. If you use less, your real cost per hour goes up.
- Otter Pro, monthly: $16.99 ÷ 20 hours (1,200 minutes) ≈ $0.85 an hour, and no more than 10 files a month.
- Otter Pro, annual: $8.33 a month ÷ 20 hours ≈ $0.42 an hour.
- Otter Business, monthly: $30 ÷ 100 hours of imports (6,000 minutes) = $0.30 an hour; annual: $19.99 ÷ 100 hours ≈ $0.20 an hour.
- RocketScribe Minute Pack: $10 ÷ 10 hours (600 minutes) = $1.00 an hour, with no subscription. A pack stays valid for 12 months.
- RocketScribe Plus, monthly: $10 ÷ 20 hours (1,200 minutes) = $0.50 an hour, with no limit on the number of files.
- RocketScribe Plus, yearly: $72 a year is $6 a month, ÷ 20 hours = $0.30 an hour.
Example: 5 hours of interviews a month
Say you record about 5 hours of interviews a month in 8 files. Otter Basic doesn't cover it, because it allows 3 imports for the life of the account and transcribes only the first 30 minutes of each. Otter Pro covers it at $16.99 a month, or $8.33 a month on annual billing, as long as you stay within 10 files.
On RocketScribe the same month costs $10 on Plus, or $6 a month on yearly billing. If your volume varies, one $10 Minute Pack covers 10 hours, so it lasts two months at this pace, and nothing renews.
When Otter is the better buy
If most of your audio is meetings you take part in, Otter's price buys much more than transcription. Its bot joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet on every plan, it transcribes live, and it writes summaries and action items. It has apps for iOS, Android and desktop, and it labels speakers on the free plan. RocketScribe has none of that: you upload or link a recording after the fact.
RocketScribe is the cheaper fit when your audio is already recorded: interviews, lectures, podcasts, voice memos or YouTube videos. It also helps when you have many or long files, need one of 90+ languages, or want SRT, VTT or CSV export on every plan.