AssemblyAI vs Modal 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 | Modal | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | Custom | $250/mo |
| 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
Starter
- $30 / month free credits
- 3 workspace seats included
- 100 containers + 10 GPU concurrency
- Scheduled and Web Functions (limited)
- Real-time metrics and logs
- Region selection
Team
- $100 / month free credits
- Unlimited seats
- 1000 containers + 50 GPU concurrency
- Unlimited Scheduled Functions
- Custom domains
- Static IP proxy
- Deployment rollbacks
Enterprise
- Volume-based discounts
- Unlimited seats
- Higher GPU concurrency
- Embedded ML engineering services
- Support via private Slack
- Audit logs, Okta SSO, and HIPAA
AssemblyAI vs Modal 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. Modal: Modal is pitching itself as the developer-friendly middle ground between raw cloud infrastructure (AWS Lambda, GCP Cloud Run) and higher-abstraction ML platforms like Replicate or Banana. GPU pricing starting at $0.000164/sec for a T4 is competitive, but the 3x multiplier for non-preemptible runs and 1.5–1.75x for region selection means production workloads can get expensive fast — they're not the cheapest option once you need reliability guarantees.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for AssemblyAI and Modal and let you know when something moves.