AssemblyAI

assemblyai.com · Compute · 1 record · JSON

AssemblyAI Compute

caveatemailno cardphoneDrequest-rate

assemblyai.com/pricing · inference API · compute/assemblyai · JSON · compare

Free tier	'$50 in free credits at signup, no credit card required. Concurrency is capped (see above) until you upgrade.' At the Universal-2 pre-recorded rate of USD 0.15 an hour, 50 / 0.15 = 333 hours of transcription. At Universal-3.5 Pro (USD 0.21 an hour) the same credit is 238 hours. unit hours; metered on wall-clock; one-time-credit
Price	none stated
Per-object cap	not applicable
Retention	not applicable
Egress	not stated
Identity	email no card and no payment method: the FAQ states '$50 in free credits at signup, no credit card required', so no payment method is taken and no hold exists. The evidence does not say which identifier the signup form asks for, so whether an email alone or an email plus a phone is required is not stated; debit and prepaid acceptance are not stated
Limits	request-rate the free tier caps streaming concurrency at '5 new streams per minute' against 100 for pay-as-you-go, so five live sessions a minute is the real wall on a free account, long before 50 dollars of credit is spent. source the free tier caps streaming concurrency at '5 new streams per minute' against 100 for pay-as-you-go, so five live sessions a minute is the real wall on a free account, long before 50 dollars of credit is spent.
Binding	request-rate the free tier caps streaming concurrency at '5 new streams per minute' against 100 for pay-as-you-go, so five live sessions a minute is the real wall on a free account, long before 50 dollars of credit is spent.
Interface	rest inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed
Tooling	not stated
Composes with	a free runner plus 333 hours of pre-recorded transcription is enough to transcribe a whole lecture or podcast archive once; pair it with a free object store from the storage lane for the audio, since the credit covers the API and nothing else. What breaks: the 5-stream streaming cap makes live capture useless, and a re-transcription after a model change spends the credit twice.
Reliability	no reliability event recorded
Notes	These are inference credits, not general compute. The page is an llms.txt-shaped 'Authoritative Reference' block dated 'Last updated: 2026-09-28' on the vendor's own pricing URL, so it is the vendor speaking and the rung is documented. The page also warns that 'Defaults can differ between free-tier and paid accounts' and that streaming bills session duration rather than audio duration, which is where a free credit disappears without producing output. Expiry of the USD 50 is not stated on the page; a 12-month read would have to come from the console.
Evidence rung	documented
Checked	2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-21

Evidence (4)

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-22	assemblyai.com/pricing	'$50 in free credits at signup, no credit card required. Concurrency is capped (see above) until you upgrade', quoted from the FAQ 'What's the free tier?'
2026-10-22	assemblyai.com/pricing	'Free-tier streaming concurrency: 5 new streams per minute. Pay-as-you-go streaming concurrency: 100 new streams per minute', quoted
2026-10-22	assemblyai.com/pricing	pre-recorded rates 'Universal-3.5 Pro ... $0.21/hr' and 'Universal-2 ... $0.15/hr', quoted; 'Pre-recorded is billed per hour of audio submitted'
2026-10-22	assemblyai.com/pricing	'$50 in free credits, no credit card required' restated in the Key Pricing Facts block, and 'EU region is the same price as US', quoted

More fields (1)

{
 "wave2": {
  "class": "credit-large-enough-for-real-workload",
  "free_tier_kind": "one-time-credit",
  "shape": {
   "vcpu": null,
   "ram_gib": null,
   "gpu_class": null,
   "gpu_count": 0
  }
 }
}

Unknown or withheld values (8)

$.egress.metered egress-unknown
$.egress.terms not-stated
$.per_object_cap.notes process
$.per_object_cap.stated not-applicable
$.reliability_note none-observed
$.retention.notes process
$.retention.stated not-applicable
$.tooling not-stated