Tabletop Arc vs DM Scribe: the same product, metered in minutes

The numbers, with sources

How we sourced this: Every Tabletop Arc figure above was read from tabletoparc.com/pricing and its homepage on 2026-09-20, both linked per row. No annual billing is shown on the pricing page — an absence we observed, not a claim that none exists. The AI-credit and image-credit allowances are recorded but deliberately not converted into recaps, questions or images, because the page does not define what one credit buys and a conversion we invented would be our number presented as theirs. No per-upload length or file-size limit is published either. We have not run the same session through both products and make no claim about relative transcript or recap quality. This is a small, actively developed product, and its pricing is the part most likely to have moved since the date above.

Minutes against hours, with your table’s number

Arc meters audio in minutes per month: 30 free, 300 on the $9 Pro plan, 1,200 on the $19 Legend plan. Ours are hours: 2.5 free, 10 for $7.99, 30 for $14.99. A four-hour session is 240 minutes, so run your own table through both before reading anything else on this page.

The free tiers first, because both are permanent rather than trials. Theirs is 30 minutes a month — an eighth of one four-hour session, so no real session shape fits inside it; what their free tier actually gives you is the unlimited campaigns, the Lore Wall and the public pages, with the audio as a taste. Ours is 2.5 hours a month plus 3 one-time bonus hours, which takes your first four-hour session whole — and a table that plays a two-hour one-shot each month never pays us anything. Neither free tier sustains a weekly four-hour game; we would rather say so than let either free plan imply it.

Now the paid maths. A weekly four-hour table uses about 16 hours in most months and 20 in a five-week one — 960 to 1,200 minutes. On Arc that is the $19 Legend plan, which a five-session month consumes exactly, to the minute. On ours it is the $14.99 plan with 10 or so hours to spare. A weekly two-hour table uses about 480 minutes: Pro’s 300 falls short, so on Arc that is Pro plus audio packs — call it $12 a month with the $8 pack amortised — or the $19 Legend plan, against $7.99 with room on ours. A monthly four-hour game is their $9 Pro against our $7.99.

Per hour of audio, that is $1.80 on Arc Pro and $0.95 on Legend, against $0.80 and $0.50 on the plans of ours they line up against. One honest exception: Arc’s largest audio pack works out at $0.80 an hour — the same rate as our $7.99 plan — and their packs persist until used, like our $4.95 five-hour bundle. The gap is in the base plans, not the top-ups. The same arithmetic for six more tools is in the cost guide.

What Tabletop Arc does that we do not

Named plainly, because a comparison page that finds no advantages in the other tool is not worth reading — and this one has real ones.

• Public pages on the free tier. Arc publishes episodes, wiki and maps as public or unlisted pages at $0. Our sharing is a private read-only link, it covers the wiki rather than everything, and it sits on the $7.99 plan — if showing your campaign to the internet matters, they are giving away what we charge for.
• Unlimited campaigns at $0. Our free plan holds one campaign; theirs holds as many as you like, with the 30 audio minutes shared across them.
• A ledger, not just a wiki. Arc describes a World Bible / State Ledger where every session writes a structured diff to canon and corrections are tracked as ledger events, with a confidence level on every claim. We cite sources when you ask your campaign a question, but we do not publish per-claim confidence levels or a session-by-session diff of the canon, and if an auditable ledger is how you want your campaign kept, that is their feature, not ours.
• Image credits on every tier. We do not make images at all. What one Arc image credit buys is not stated on their pricing page — see the note under the table — but an image feature of any size is more than our zero.

Where the overlap is real, and the differences inside it

Both products turn a session recording into a transcript, a "previously on" recap and a self-building campaign reference, and both split what the GM sees from what players see: their recaps and wiki publish as GM-private or player-safe, and our shared wiki is a whitelist that never sends GM notes to the browser at all. On the description level these are the same product, which is why the meters matter so much.

The difference we will claim is upstream: before your audio is transcribed, we prime the model with your own campaign’s glossary, characters and recorded nicknames, so an invented name settles on one spelling and keeps it — how that works. Nothing on Arc’s site describes priming transcription with your campaign’s own vocabulary; that is an absence we observed, not proof they do nothing of the kind.

Inputs differ too. Arc’s site describes GMs uploading session recordings. We also take video containers — MP4, MOV, MKV, with the audio track pulled out and multi-track files mixed — and a pasted or uploaded transcript on every plan, spending zero audio hours. Whether Arc accepts text or video its pages do not say, so we will not say either.

The fine print neither pricing page can settle for you

Arc’s plans meter four resources — audio minutes, AI credits, image credits and storage — and its pricing page does not say what a single AI credit or image credit buys. That is not a gotcha; it just means you cannot compute in advance what a month of recaps and questions costs in credits, where our non-audio meters are stated in the unit you experience: 5, 50 or 200 questions a day and 2, 10 or unlimited transcript imports a month, by plan.

Neither site claims speaker labelling. Our transcripts are the words in order, unattributed, and nothing on Arc’s pages claims per-speaker tags either. If attribution matters to you, record per-speaker tracks at source — Craig on Discord and Zoom’s per-participant setting both do it free — and keep the files.

And one asymmetry of disclosure: our per-upload cap is published — a single upload takes a session up to 8 hours and 500 MB — while Arc’s pages state no per-upload length or size limit. That is an absence, not a promise of unlimited; if your sessions run very long, it is the first thing to ask them.