Cost
How much does closed captioning cost?
Between $0.033 and $2.75 per minute of video in 2026, and which end you land on is settled by one question: whether a person listens to it. Machine captioning is priced in cents a minute. A human captioner is priced in dollars a minute, and is worth it for a narrower set of videos than the people selling it will tell you.
Captioning rates per minute of video
A subscription costs the same whether you use it or not, so its real per-minute rate is decided by how much video you caption in a month. That is why the middle row moves across the table and the other two do not.
| Band | 1 h of video/mo | 5 h of video/mo | 20 h of video/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-serve AI, pay per use (us) | $0.033 | $0.033 | $0.033 |
| Self-serve AI, subscription (6 services) | $0.28–$0.50 | $0.057–$0.100 | $0.014–$0.074 |
| Human transcription | $1.20–$2.75 | $1.20–$2.75 | $1.20–$2.75 |
Why the subscription band is a range
Every service in that middle row prices in plans, included minutes and overage, and none of them publishes a cost per minute of video, because the arithmetic is unflattering and doing it is work. The honest figure is the cheapest plan that covers your volume divided by that volume — which is why a cheap plan can cost more per minute than an expensive one, and why almost every service is at its best at exactly the volume its marketing assumes you have.
It is also why captioning is the job subscriptions suit worst. Video work is lumpy: a launch month, then three quiet ones. A plan bills all four.
The same arithmetic per service rather than per band, with the break-even volume for each, is on the comparison page.
What our own minimum does to a short clip
We charge $2.00 per hour of audio with a $2.00 minimum per file, so the top row of that table is true of an hour-long file and not of a 5-minute one. A 5-minute clip costs the minimum, which works out at $0.40 a minute — 12 times the hourly rate expressed per minute.
That is dearer per minute than the cheapest subscription in the middle row is at an hour of video a month ($0.28). If your captioning is a handful of short clips and nothing else, a monthly plan may genuinely be the better buy — and the table above is how you check that, rather than a reason to take our word for it.
The minimum is per file rather than per month, so it is a floor on small work and not a subscription in disguise: two short clips are two minimums, one long recording is one, and a month with nothing in it is nothing.
The two bands with no published rate
Doing it yourself — an open speech model on your own machine, or a video platform’s automatic captions — has no rate to quote. It costs electricity, an afternoon of setup and your own time on the corrections, and anybody publishing a per-minute figure for it has made one up. For a few videos a month it is a real answer, and it is the one answer this page cannot price.
Live and broadcast captioning is the other. It is a different job — realtime, no correction window, captioners working in redundant shifts — and none of the services in our index publishes a rate for it. The previous version of this page quoted a range for it anyway. That range came from no source we can show you, so it is gone: if you need a live captioner the price is a quote, and it will be a multiple of everything in the table.
Which band a given video needs
- Machine captioning is enough for internal video, course material, social clips and podcasts — anything you will read before it ships and can fix a name in. Both machine bands produce the same kind of output; what differs between them is how you are billed for it.
- A person is worth the order-of-magnitude difference when a contract names an accuracy floor you have to meet — an accessibility obligation, a broadcaster agreement, a court record — because a machine transcript cannot be certified and a captioner can be held to one.
- A person is also worth it on audio that defeats machines: heavy crosstalk, speakers switching language mid-sentence, a bad room, dense specialist vocabulary. Caption a few minutes of it by machine first — that is the cheapest way to find out which side of the line a recording is on.
- For everything else the deciding question is not quality but shape: steady volume every month favours a subscription, and uneven volume favours paying per file.
What the machine rate buys here
$2.00 per hour of audio, $2.00 minimum per file, tax included, with no subscription, no seats and nothing that expires. Captions come out as SRT or VTT with the timings on them, and the same transcript as TXT, DOCX or PDF when you want it read rather than played. Speaker labels are included rather than an add-on. If a transcription fails, the card authorization is cancelled and no money is taken. Audio is deleted 90 days after your last sign-in.
The whole price list is on the pricing page, and it is one sentence long.