Saga20 vs DM Scribe: voice recognition against an hour meter

The numbers, with sources

How we sourced this: Every Saga20 figure above was read from saga20.com’s own pricing page and homepage on 2026-09-20. Annual prices are not quoted because the pricing page advertises "2 months free" with yearly billing without displaying per-plan annual figures — a number we computed ourselves would be ours, not theirs. No per-session length limit or session definition is stated anywhere we could find, and past 24 sessions a month the page says to contact them rather than listing an add-on price; both are absences we observed, not claims about what exists. The voice-recognition rows record what the site advertises — we have not tested its accuracy and do not claim to have. This is a small, actively developed product, and its pricing is the part most likely to have moved since the date above.

A session against an hour: run your own numbers first

Saga20’s plans are counted in session summaries per month: 6 on its $12.99 Dungeon Master plan, 12 on Epic Campaign at $19.99, 24 on Legendary Saga at $39.99, and the free tier holds one recorded session in total. A session counts once whether it ran two hours or six — their pages state no per-session length limit, and we did not find one either way, so this arithmetic takes the metering at face value. Ours are counted in hours of audio: 2.5 a month free, 10 for $7.99, 30 for $14.99.

A weekly table playing four-hour sessions uses 4 sessions and about 16 hours in most months, 5 and 20 in the occasional five-week one. On Saga20 that fits the $12.99 plan with a session to spare even in the long months. On ours, 16 hours does not fit the $7.99 plan and you would be on the $14.99 one. For that table Saga20 is two dollars a month cheaper, and if your sessions run longer still, the gap widens — the session meter never notices the extra hours.

Change the schedule instead of the hours and the answer flips. A group playing twice a week for two hours uses the same 16 hours but 8 or 9 sessions — past Saga20’s 6, so the $19.99 Epic plan — while ours is still $14.99. A weekly two-hour game is 4 or 5 sessions and at most 10 hours: $12.99 there, $7.99 here. Frequent-and-short favours the hour meter as surely as long-and-rare favours the session meter. The same arithmetic for six other tools is in our cost guide.

One caution while you compare: both products sell a plan named Dungeon Master. Theirs is $12.99 for 6 sessions; ours is $7.99 for 10 hours. Every plan name on this page belongs to the product it is next to.

They recognize voices. We do not.

Saga20’s headline feature is the one we get asked about most: its homepage says your players’ voices are recognized automatically across every session you record, using what it describes as voice fingerprints matched to each player in future recordings, and its pricing table lists voice recognition on every plan. That is what the site advertises — we have not tested its accuracy and do not claim to have — but it is a real capability we simply do not offer. Our transcripts are the words in order, unattributed, and our recaps and wiki read the content rather than the speaker labels.

How much attribution is worth depends on what you do with the transcript. For a recap of what happened, it rarely changes the summary; for pulling quotes, settling who agreed to what, or following one player’s arc, it matters a great deal. If you want attribution without Saga20, the free route is per-speaker tracks at the source — Craig records one file per Discord speaker by default, and Zoom will do it with one setting — and you keep the per-voice files to check any line against. A multi-track file such as an OBS recording works with us as-is, but the tracks are mixed together on upload: mixed is the opposite of attributed.

What Saga20 does that we do not

Beyond the voices, named plainly.

• Unlimited text-only sessions, even on the free tier. If half your campaign happened before you started recording, you can type or paste the backlog in without it counting against anything. Our equivalent is transcript import — it spends no audio hours, but it is metered: 2 a month free, 10 on our $7.99 plan, unlimited only on the $14.99 one.
• Image storage with the campaign — 1 GB on the $12.99 plan, 5 GB on Epic, unlimited on Legendary. We store no campaign images at all and do not generate any.
• Publishing recaps to Discord in one click. We have no Discord integration; sharing with players here is a read-only wiki link, and publishing it sits on our paid plans.

What we do that Saga20 does not appear to

A free plan that renews. Saga20’s free tier is generous in an unusual shape — unlimited text sessions, the wiki, voice recognition — but it includes exactly one recorded-session summary, in total, not per month. Ours is 2.5 hours of transcription every month, forever, plus 3 one-time bonus hours at signup: a table that plays a short session each month can stay on it indefinitely, and an overflowing month can take a 5-hour bundle at $4.95 that never expires.

Campaign questions on every plan. Saga20’s own comparison table lists Campaign Chat on the $19.99 Epic Campaign plan and up. Our Ask Your Campaign answers questions about your own sessions, with citations back to where the answer came from, on every plan — 5 questions a day free, 50 on our Dungeon Master plan, 200 on Guild Master. We have not used Campaign Chat, so this is a comparison of availability, not of quality.

A vocabulary loop from your own campaign. Before each transcription we prime the model with your glossary, player characters and recorded nicknames, so an invented name settles on one spelling and keeps it week to week — the mechanics are here. We did not find an equivalent described on Saga20’s pages; that is an absence we observed, not a claim that none exists.