AssemblyAI vs Baseten Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| AssemblyAI | Baseten | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | Custom |
| Number of plans | 2 | 3 |
| Free plan | ||
| Free trial | — | |
| Pricing model | usage-based | usage-based |
Pay as you go
- Universal-3.5 Pro ($0.21/hr)
- Universal-2 ($0.15/hr)
- Universal-3.5 Pro Realtime ($0.45/hr)
- Universal-Streaming ($0.15/hr)
- Universal-Streaming Multilingual ($0.15/hr)
- Sync API ($0.45/hr)
- Voice Agent API ($4.50/hr)
- Speaker Diarization ($0.02/hr pre-recorded, $0.12/hr realtime)
- Medical Mode ($0.15/hr)
- Keyterms Prompting
- Prompting ($0.05/hr)
- Speaker Identification ($0.02/hr)
- Translation ($0.06/hr)
- Custom Formatting ($0.03/hr)
- Entity Detection ($0.08/hr)
- Sentiment Analysis ($0.02/hr)
- Auto Chapters ($0.08/hr)
- Key Phrases ($0.01/hr)
- Topic Detection ($0.15/hr)
- Summarization ($0.03/hr)
- Profanity Filtering ($0.01/hr)
- PII Audio Redaction ($0.05/hr)
- PII Text Redaction ($0.08/hr)
- Content Moderation ($0.15/hr)
- LLM Gateway
- No minimum commitments
- No credit card required to start
Custom
- Custom rate limits
- Enhanced concurrency
- Enterprise-grade flexibility
- Volume-based pricing
- Custom starting concurrency limits
Basic
- Dedicated deployments
- Model APIs
- Training
- Fast cold starts
- SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant
- Email and in-app chat support
Pro
- Priority access to high-demand GPUs
- Dedicated compute
- Higher Model API rate limits
- Hands-on engineering expertise
- Dedicated support on Slack and Zoom
Enterprise
- Custom SLAs
- Self-host deployments
- On-demand flex compute
- Use existing cloud commitments
- Full control over data residency
- Advanced security and compliance
- Custom global regions
- Advanced RBAC with Teams
AssemblyAI vs Baseten FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Both offer free plans, so you can try each without paying. Start with whichever fits your workflow better and upgrade when you hit the limits.
- How do they charge?
- Both use a usage-based model, so the comparison is straightforward — it comes down to features and limits at each price point.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. AssemblyAI: They're positioning as the developer-friendly, API-first alternative to Deepgram and Rev AI — competitive on price at scale but differentiated by the breadth of AI features (LLM Gateway, multichannel, etc.). The AWS Marketplace listing signals they're actively chasing enterprise procurement budgets. Baseten: Landing on custom quotes for anything beyond entry-level puts Baseten in the mid-to-premium bracket, competing for teams with real production ML workloads rather than hobbyists. They're not trying to win on sticker price — they're betting that volume discounts and dedicated deals close bigger accounts than a public price list would.
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