GM Assistant alternative: credits against hours for the same session

The numbers, with sources

How we sourced this: Every GM Assistant figure above was read from gmassistant.app on 2026-10-03 — its homepage pricing table, FAQ, docs and blog, linked per row. The pricing table loads showing yearly billing at Brief depth; the monthly, pay-as-you-go and Comprehensive figures appear only when you click those toggles, so we read them from the configuration that site’s own pricing table renders from, and the FAQ confirms the $9 and $25 monthly prices and both credit rates in prose. The hours per plan are the figures their page displays; the per-hour costs and yearly totals on this page are our arithmetic from those published rates, and the cheapest-combination totals assume each pay-as-you-go rate applies to any purchase above its minimum (2,500 credits for Bulk, 5,000 for Big bulk), which the page implies but does not state. The usage figures are their own claims. This is a comparison, not a GM Assistant app review: we have not run a session through their product and make no claim about relative transcript or note quality. It is a small, actively developed product, and its pricing is the part most likely to have moved since the date above.

Two hour meters, one weekly four-hour game

If you are weighing a GM Assistant alternative, start with the meter, because it is the one place these two products compare directly: both charge for hours of session audio. Theirs are sold as credits — 60 per hour at Brief depth, 100 at Comprehensive — so the $9 Standard plan’s 750 monthly credits are 12.5 Brief hours or 7.5 Comprehensive ones. Ours are plain hours: 2.5 a month free, 10 for $7.99, 30 for $14.99. Every figure is in the table above.

Per Brief hour, their Standard plan is $0.72 paid monthly and $0.60 paid yearly, against $0.80 and $0.64 on our $7.99 plan — theirs is cheaper. Their $25 Pro plan is $0.75 and about $0.63, against $0.50 and $0.40 on our $14.99 plan — ours is cheaper. Comprehensive costs two-thirds more per hour on every plan of theirs. Which of their depths matches what we produce is a judgment to make on your own session; we have not run one through both.

A weekly four-hour game is about 208 hours a year — 16 in most months, 20 in a five-week one. At Brief depth that is 12,480 credits, and the cheapest route on their published rates is Standard plus a Bulk pay-as-you-go top-up of about 3,500 credits: roughly $146 a year billed annually, $164 paying monthly. Ours is the Guild Master plan, $143.90 a year or $179.88 paying monthly. On annual billing that is a tie, so price does not decide this table. At Comprehensive depth the same game is 20,800 credits: their Pro plan at $250 a year, or, paying monthly, about $273 for Standard plus a Big-bulk top-up (Pro paid monthly is $300) — against the same $143.90 and $179.88 here.

Change the schedule and the answer moves. A weekly three-hour game at Brief depth is their clearest win: billed annually it fits their 12.5-hour plan with a small top-up for about $98 a year, while ours overflows the 10-hour plan into about $116 of plan plus hour bundles. A weekly two-hour game goes the other way: about $87 a year on their Big-bulk pay-as-you-go rate (or $90 on Standard billed yearly), against our $76.70. And a four-hour game once a month is where their pay as you go shines, at about $46 a year with no subscription — though ours needs none either: 2.5 free hours every month plus four $4.95 five-hour bundles comes to $19.80 a year. The same arithmetic for other tools is in our cost guide.

What GM Assistant does that we do not

Named plainly, because these are the reasons to pick it.

• Speaker labels from per-speaker tracks. Upload a Craig or Zencastr recording as one track per speaker and every transcript line says who spoke. We take one file per upload: we mix the audio tracks inside that file, but separate per-speaker files have to be combined into one first (the Craig guide covers it), and our transcript is unattributed. Uploading each speaker’s file separately would bill every track at the full session length. Their docs are candid about the limit: several mics in one room each hear everyone, so an in-person table gets no labels from either of us yet — their August 2026 update names single-microphone speaker labels as the next feature, with alpha testers first.
• Credits that wait. Unused subscription credits roll over for up to a year, pay-as-you-go credits never expire, and a subscription can be paused for one to three months. Our monthly hours reset each billing cycle; only our $4.95 bundles carry over. A table that plays in bursts is better served by their meter.
• Longer uploads: 10 hours and 4 GB per recording, against our 8 hours and 500 MB.
• Smart Edit: type an instruction — rename a misheard NPC everywhere, fix who found the sword — and it proposes the change across every section for you to approve. We let you hand-edit recaps and wiki entries and regenerate a recap at a different length or tone, but nothing here edits by instruction.
• More ways out: notes as Markdown, HTML, YAML or a Homebrewery document, transcripts as text, SRT, VTT, JSON or (since August 2026) Markdown, and a developer API open to every user. We export a session as one printable document and the wiki as Markdown, and publish no API.
• AI on their own hardware. Their FAQ says most of their AI runs on their own hardware; our transcription, extraction and recaps run on OpenAI’s API — our privacy policy says what goes where.

What we do that GM Assistant does not appear to

A free plan that renews. Their free start is one session, with no card. Ours is 2.5 hours every month plus 3 one-time bonus hours at signup, also with no card, and a table that records a short game each month can stay on it indefinitely. As a single trial, theirs may be better for long sessions: their page states no length limit on the free session beyond the general 10-hour cap, while our first month gives you 5.5 hours in total.

Recording and video in. Their docs say GM Assistant does not record, and that a video needs its audio extracted before upload. We have a recorder in the browser, with pause and resume, and take MP4, MOV and MKV files directly. The recorder hears your device’s microphone only, not tab or system audio — at a Discord game it captures you, not the call — and if a phone voice memo is your setup, neither difference matters.

A campaign layer that accumulates. What their pages describe is per session: each analysis lists that session’s NPCs, locations and items, and Campaign Details is a page you write yourself. Our wiki grows across sessions, keeps a nickname as an alias of one entry once you merge the duplicate it creates, and shows on every entry which sessions it appeared in, with a snippet of how it came up. Ask Your Campaign answers questions with citations — 5, 50 or 200 a day by plan — and the relationship map starts on our $7.99 Dungeon Master plan. We found none of the three described on their site; that is an absence we observed, not proof none exists.

Where the two overlap, and the fine print

Both treat invented names as a problem, by different routes. They run a spelling-correction pass from the Campaign Details you enter and can show a raw and a corrected transcript; we prime transcription itself with your glossary (pronunciation hints included), player characters, aliases and recent wiki entries — how that works. Neither is proof of better accuracy, and we have not compared them on the same audio.

Both share read-only notes with players. Theirs is a Make Public link for a session or a whole campaign that never exposes the transcript or audio, with no plan requirement named in their FAQ. Ours is a read-only wiki link players open without an account — GM notes never sent, links that expire and can be revoked — on the $7.99 Dungeon Master plan and up.

Two checks before you plan around GM Assistant. It is sold only in listed countries, for tax reasons — the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the UAE, Ukraine, Norway, Japan and the EU. And its FAQ lists English as fully supported, with French, German and Spanish in beta and fifteen more languages in early support. We publish no language list, so a table playing in another language should test either tool on a real recording first.