Deepgram vs AssemblyAI pricing (2026)
For realtime voice agents, AssemblyAI's Universal-Streaming lists at $0.15/hr ($0.0025/min), billed on session time; Deepgram's cheapest streaming model, Nova-3 Monolingual, is $0.0048/min on a promotional rate (regular $0.0077). Both sell a bundled Voice Agent API at $0.075/min. Only Deepgram also sells TTS (Aura).
Streaming speech-to-text
| Vendor | Product | $/call-min | $/1,000 min | Vendor's price | Status | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AssemblyAI | Universal-Streaming (English) | $0.0025 | $2.50 | $0.15/hr Billed on session duration. Streaming diarization +$0.12/hr. | verified | 2026-10-17 · source |
| AssemblyAI | Universal-Streaming (Multilingual) | $0.0025 | $2.50 | $0.15/hr Billed on session duration. | verified | 2026-10-17 · source |
| Deepgram | Nova-3 Monolingual, streaming | $0.0048 | $4.80 | $0.0048/min Promotional rate; regular $0.0077/min | verifiedpromo | 2026-10-17 · source |
| Deepgram | Nova-3 Multilingual, streaming | $0.0058 | $5.80 | $0.0058/min Promotional rate; regular $0.0092/min | verifiedpromo | 2026-10-17 · source |
| Deepgram | Flux (English), streaming | $0.0065 | $6.50 | $0.0065/min (Pay As You Go) Billed per second. Growth plan rates are lower. Promotional rate; regular $0.0077/min | verifiedpromo | 2026-10-17 · source |
| AssemblyAI | Universal-3.6 Pro Realtime | $0.0075 | $7.50 | $0.45/hr Streaming billed on session duration, not speech duration. | verified | 2026-10-17 · source |
| Deepgram | Flux Multilingual, streaming | $0.0078 | $7.80 | $0.0078/min | verified | 2026-10-17 · source |
Voice agent APIs
| Vendor | Product | $/call-min | $/1,000 min | Vendor's price | Status | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deepgram | Voice Agent API (Standard) | $0.0750 | $75.00 | $0.075/min; BYO LLM or BYO TTS $0.065; BYO LLM+TTS $0.050; Advanced $0.163 Telephony separate. | verified | 2026-10-17 · source |
| AssemblyAI | Voice Agent API | $0.0750 | $75.00 | $0.075/min, all-inclusive Telephony separate. | verified | 2026-10-17 · source |
Deepgram TTS (AssemblyAI has none)
| Vendor | Product | $/call-min | $/1,000 min | Vendor's price | Status | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deepgram | Aura-1 | $0.0075 | $7.50 | $0.015 per 1K characters | verified | 2026-10-17 · source |
| Deepgram | Aura-2 | $0.0150 | $15.00 | $0.030 per 1K characters | verified | 2026-10-17 · source |
| Deepgram | Flux TTS | $0.0225 | $22.50 | $0.045 per 1K characters | verified | 2026-10-17 · source |
Sources: Deepgram, AssemblyAI, checked 2026-10-17. TTS per-minute assumes 1,000 characters per minute of speech and the agent talking 50% of the call.