Deepgram public-data review: the rate card that changes tomorrow

What changes on 15 September 2026

Deepgram's pricing page marks its voice agent rates as promotional "through 9/14" and prints the replacement rate beside each one. Three configurations show a post-promotional figure; three do not.

In plain terms, an hour of standard agent conversation goes from $3.36 to $4.50 on pay as you go, and an advanced hour from $7.32 to $9.78. The increases cluster tightly around a third, with one exception worth noticing: bring-your-own-LLM on the Growth plan rises 43.9%, the steepest move on the card, which quietly halves the reward for supplying your own model. Today that configuration saves 19.6% against standard on Growth; from tomorrow it saves 13.2%.

Flux TTS changes at the same moment, from free to $0.0450 per 1,000 characters. Because half the rows carry no replacement figure, the post-promotional price of any BYO configuration cannot be established from the page and is deliberately not estimated here.

Two official Deepgram pages give different end dates

This one matters today, because the two answers are two days apart and one of them is already in the past. Deepgram's pricing page states that Flux TTS is free "until 9/14", with standard pricing resuming 15 September 2026. But the Flux TTS product page and the launch post of 12 August 2026 both say, in identical wording: "Through September 12, 2026, developers can build with Flux TTS free with up to 45 concurrent streaming connections globally (5 in EU/AU). Standard pricing applies beginning September 13, 2026."

So on the day this page was written, one official Deepgram surface says Flux TTS is free and another says it has been billable for two days. CartSignal is not in a position to say which system is running; if you generated Flux TTS speech on 13 or 14 September, check the usage dashboard rather than either page.

The full published rate card

Speech to text

The streaming table is labelled "Limited-time promotional rates on streaming" and prints a regular price beside the current one. Crucially, that label carries no end date — unlike the voice agent rows, there is nothing to plan around.

The gap between Flux and Nova-3 is a discount, not a price. At regular prices, Flux English streaming and Nova-3 Monolingual streaming cost exactly the same — $0.0077 a minute on pay as you go, $0.0065 on Growth. The 35% premium Flux appears to carry today exists only because Nova-3 is discounted about 38% and Flux only about 16%. Anyone reading the current column and concluding that Deepgram's conversational turn-detecting model is inherently pricier than its general one has the wrong end of it; at list price they are the same number, and the current gap can close whenever Deepgram chooses.

Real-time gets much dearer if that promotion ends. Streaming Nova-3 Monolingual currently costs 11.6% more than the pre-recorded rate ($0.0048 against $0.0043). At the stated regular streaming price of $0.0077 it would cost 79% more than batch. If your pipeline can tolerate batch transcription, that is the difference between a modest real-time surcharge and a substantial one — and there is no published date by which to decide.

Whisper is the expensive way to buy transcription here. OpenAI's Whisper Large on Deepgram lists at $0.0048 a minute, 11.6% more than Deepgram's own newer Nova-3 Monolingual pre-recorded at $0.0043. It is also the only row on the entire card with no Growth discount at all, so for a committed customer the gap widens to 33.3% ($0.288 an hour against $0.216).

Text to speech

Deepgram's speech card is an unusually tidy 1 : 2 : 3 ladder — Aura-2 is exactly twice Aura-1, Flux TTS exactly three times it — and the Growth discount is exactly 10.0% on all three. The per-minute column uses 1,000 characters to the minute, the density ElevenLabs publishes on its own API page and the basis this site applies to every per-character vendor.

Ranked against the field in dollars per million characters, Deepgram occupies three separate rungs of one ladder: Aura-1 at $15.00 ties Inworld TTS-2 Flash near the cheap end, Aura-2 at $30.00 matches Murf's API, and Flux TTS at $45.00 sits above Cartesia Scale's $37.38 and reaches 90% of ElevenLabs' own API floor of $50.00. A 3x spread inside a single vendor's rate card is larger than the gap between many pairs of vendors, which is the general lesson this site keeps finding: the model you pick usually moves the bill more than the logo does.

The voice agent bundle against its own parts

Deepgram is one of very few vendors that publishes both a bundled agent rate and the component rates that bundle is built from, which makes the markup calculable rather than guessable. The table below sums Deepgram's own published prices for one minute of conversation: a full minute of audio transcribed with Nova-3 Monolingual streaming at $0.0048, plus the characters the agent speaks at the chosen TTS rate. Speaking density is the one assumption, so it is shown at two values rather than one.

The obvious objection is that the bundle also includes a language model, which the component sum leaves out. Deepgram answers that itself. Its bring-your-own-LLM row is $0.065 from 15 September against $0.075 standard — so by Deepgram's own price list, the bundled language model is worth $0.010 a minute, or $0.60 an hour. On the cheapest configuration that leaves roughly $0.053 a minute, about 70% of the standard rate, paying for orchestration, turn-taking, interruption handling, session management and margin. That may well be worth it — assembling a production agent out of raw streaming endpoints is real engineering — but it is a service fee, not a speech cost, and it is far larger than the speech.

Bringing your own text to speech costs more, not less

The oddest line on the card: Standard — BYO TTS is $0.065 a minute on pay as you go, against $0.056 for plain Standard. Supplying your own speech synthesis, removing a component Deepgram would otherwise provide, carries a 16.1% penalty. On the Growth plan the two are the identical $0.051, so the penalty exists only for pay-as-you-go customers. At the advanced tier, BYO TTS is priced identically to plain Advanced ($0.122 and $0.110), and once you have brought your own LLM, adding your own TTS changes nothing at all — Custom — BYO LLM and Custom — BYO LLM + TTS are both $0.050. Across six published configurations, the only one that reduces the price is bringing your own language model. Deepgram publishes no explanation for the BYO TTS premium, so it is recorded here as a published fact to check at signup rather than interpreted.

Where Deepgram sits after tomorrow

Against the agent rates this site has verified elsewhere, the 15 September increase does not just make Deepgram dearer — it changes the ordering.

Deepgram's standard agent minute moves from 6.7% below Cartesia to exactly 25% above it, and from 30% below ElevenLabs to 6.25% below. Cartesia becomes the cheapest published agent minute listed on this site — but only for a bring-your-own-number setup, because Cartesia adds $0.014 a minute on a Cartesia-provided phone number, taking it to $0.074. Read that way the ordering barely moves: for anything telephony-based, Deepgram's bring-your-own-LLM configuration at $0.065 still undercuts Cartesia's $0.074, while Deepgram's plain standard minute at $0.075 lands within a tenth of a cent of it. None of this is a quality judgement: these are list prices for products that differ in latency, language coverage and how much of the stack they hand you.

How you actually buy it

There are no monthly tiers. Deepgram's pricing page lists a $200 credit to start, described as carrying "No minimums. No expiration. No credit card required" — the no-expiration part is unusual enough to be worth stating, since credits that expire are the norm across this directory. The Growth plan is listed from $4,000 a year in prepaid credits "redeemed against actual usage", in exchange for the lower Growth column. Enterprise is a custom quote with cloud, private-cloud and on-premises deployment; Deepgram's documentation notes that Flux "is now available for self-hosted deployments".

What the free $200 buys, at the rates above:

That is a genuinely generous evaluation budget for everything except live agents, where 44 hours goes quickly under load testing. Published concurrency caps on the starting plan are up to 50 concurrent requests for speech-to-text REST, up to 45 across text-to-speech REST and websocket, and up to 45 websocket connections for Voice Agent.

One claim on the page does not reconcile with the rate table. Growth is advertised as "Save up to 20%", but measured row by row the Growth discount runs from 0% on Whisper Large to 18.0% on bring-your-own-LLM at promotional rates, with most rows clustered at 10–13% and the best non-promotional row at 17.3% (Nova-3 Multilingual, pre-recorded). Nothing on the published card reaches 20%. The page attributes the saving to prepaid credits, so the extra may live in the prepay terms rather than the rates — but it is not in the rates, and a buyer sizing a commitment from the table should plan on 10–17%.

What Deepgram actually sells

• Nova-3 speech to text, monolingual and multilingual, in streaming and pre-recorded flavours, plus a hosted Whisper Large option.
• Flux speech to text, built for conversation, with configurable end-of-turn detection. Deepgram's docs describe tunable eot_threshold, eager_eot_threshold and eot_timeout_ms settings, mid-stream configuration updates and a force-end-turn signal.
• Aura-1 and Aura-2 text to speech, Aura-2 described by Deepgram as "an enterprise-grade text-to-speech model built for professional, cost-effective voice at scale".
• Flux TTS, released 12 August 2026 for live conversation, with named voices including Haley, Heather, Priya, Jack, Bruce, Rufus and Drew across American, Indian and British accents, and "one conversational speech model across ten languages".
• Voice Agent API, bundling transcription, a language model and synthesis behind one per-minute meter, with bring-your-own-LLM and bring-your-own-TTS configurations.
• Cloud, private cloud and on-premises deployment, which is a genuine differentiator against most of the hosted-only vendors in this directory.

Deepgram's performance claims for Flux TTS — responses "in as low as 80ms" even under production load, a 73.4% win rate on naturalness and 77.5% on expressiveness in blind comparison against twelve competing models, and a 9.8% word error rate on hard prompts such as drug names and tracking numbers — are reproduced here as vendor claims. CartSignal has generated no audio and verified none of them. Voice cloning is not offered on the Flux TTS product page; launch coverage described it as on the roadmap alongside additional languages and finer emotional controls.

Best-fit use cases

• High-volume transcription, where $0.258 an hour pre-recorded is among the cheapest published rates in this directory
• Production voice agents where you want one meter and one vendor rather than stitching three together
• Teams that already run their own language model and want the 13% BYO-LLM saving
• Regulated or air-gapped deployments needing on-premises or private-cloud speech
• Cheap programmatic narration on Aura-1, provided realism is not the deciding factor
• Evaluation on a real budget, given a $200 credit with no card and no expiry

Limitations to verify

• Streaming speech-to-text rates are promotional with no published end date; regular prices are up to 60% higher on Nova-3
• Half the voice agent configurations publish no post-promotional price, so a BYO budget cannot be projected past 14 September from public data
• Two official pages disagree on when the Flux TTS free window closed — 12 or 14 September
• The advertised "up to 20%" Growth saving does not appear on any published rate row
• Bringing your own TTS to the standard agent tier costs 16.1% more on pay as you go, with no stated reason
• The Growth discount requires a prepaid commitment listed from $4,000 a year
• No voice cloning on the current Flux TTS product page
• Deepgram publishes no statement located during this review about machine-readable watermarking of generated audio, which matters for the duties in our EU AI Act labeling guide

How it fits against other tools here

Deepgram and Cartesia are the closest pair in this directory: both are developer-first, both sell speech generation and transcription plus a separately metered agent product, and both compete on latency rather than voice realism. The difference is how they package it — Cartesia runs one credit pool with agents billed separately in dollars, Deepgram runs pure usage billing with no pool at all, which makes Deepgram easier to forecast and Cartesia cheaper to start. From 15 September, Cartesia also holds the cheaper agent minute.

Against ElevenLabs, the comparison is a category apart. ElevenLabs competes on voice realism, dubbing and cloning depth and prices accordingly; Deepgram publishes no cloning and no dubbing rate at all, and its most expensive speech model still undercuts ElevenLabs' cheapest API model. If you are choosing a narration voice, that is the wrong comparison to make on price. Murf AI is the pick if you want a timeline editor rather than an API, and Speechify's developer API remains the lowest published per-character rate on this site.

The wider rankings are best AI voice tools, priced by job and the ElevenLabs alternatives shortlist, and the full category sits on the AI voice tools page.

FAQ

How much does Deepgram cost?

Deepgram sells usage, not subscriptions. As of 14 September 2026, on pay as you go: pre-recorded transcription from $0.0043 a minute ($0.258 an hour) on Nova-3 Monolingual; streaming at a promotional $0.0048 against a stated regular $0.0077; text to speech at $15.00, $30.00 and $45.00 per million characters on Aura-1, Aura-2 and Flux TTS; and a bundled voice agent at $0.056 a minute through 14 September, rising to $0.075. New accounts start with a $200 credit the pricing page says has no minimums, no expiration and needs no credit card. Growth is listed from $4,000 a year in prepaid credits.

What changes in Deepgram's pricing on 15 September 2026?

Three rows rise. On pay as you go the standard agent minute goes $0.056 → $0.075 (+33.9%), bring-your-own-LLM $0.050 → $0.065 (+30.0%) and advanced $0.122 → $0.163 (+33.6%). On Growth the same rows go $0.051 → $0.068, $0.041 → $0.059 and $0.110 → $0.146, making BYO-LLM on Growth the steepest rise on the card at 43.9%. Flux TTS stops being free and begins billing at $0.0450 per 1,000 characters. Deepgram's own pages disagree on the date: the pricing page says free through 14 September, while the Flux TTS product page and the 12 August launch post both say the window closed on 12 September.

Is Deepgram's Voice Agent API cheaper than assembling the same call from Deepgram's own parts?

No. A minute transcribed with Nova-3 Monolingual streaming ($0.0048) plus 500 characters of Aura-1 speech ($0.0075) is $0.0123 in components, against $0.075 for the bundled standard minute from 15 September — about 6.1x. The bundle also carries a language model, but Deepgram prices that itself at $0.010 a minute via the BYO-LLM row, so the model explains roughly a sixth of the gap and orchestration explains the rest. Even at 1,000 characters a minute on the priciest Flux TTS voice, the bundle is still about 1.5x its own components.

Is Deepgram's Flux TTS worth three times Aura-1?

Only for live conversation. The card is a clean 1:2:3 ladder at $15.00, $30.00 and $45.00 per million characters, and Flux TTS is positioned on latency and interruption handling — Deepgram claims responses in as low as 80ms across ten languages, and first place on naturalness in its own blind comparison against twelve models, all vendor claims reproduced rather than verified. For narration rendered once and played back, none of that justifies 3x, and Aura-1 at $15.00 per million is among the cheapest rates listed on this site.

Has CartSignal tested Deepgram?

No. This is a public-data review built from Deepgram's official pricing page, product pages, developer documentation and launch post, checked 14 September 2026. No audio was generated or transcribed, and no accuracy, latency or voice quality claim is verified. Per-hour conversions, percentage changes and the component-versus-bundle arithmetic are CartSignal's, applied to Deepgram's own published numbers.

Source links

• Official Deepgram pricing page (all rates, promotional and regular prices, plan tiers, concurrency)
• Official Flux TTS product page (promotional window, voices, latency and win-rate claims)
• Official Flux TTS launch post, 12 August 2026 (free window and standard-pricing date)
• Official text-to-speech product page (Aura-2 positioning, deployment options, $0.045 per 1,000 characters)
• Official Flux documentation (end-of-turn parameters, self-hosted availability)