What it actually costs to transcribe a four-hour D&D session

The unit that matters is the session, not the minute

A typical session runs about four hours — 240 minutes of audio with four to six people talking, sometimes at once. Transcription is priced in minutes, subscriptions, or monthly hour allowances, and the only fair way to compare them is to push the same 240-minute session through each and see what falls out.

Two numbers matter: what one session costs, and what a weekly campaign costs per month. Services that look cheap on the first number can be expensive on the second, and the reverse.

Per-minute services: the multiplication nobody does

Rev charges $0.25 a minute for AI transcription and $1.99 a minute for human transcription. For one four-hour session that is $60.00 AI or $477.60 human; for a weekly campaign, $240 a month AI. Human transcription buys real accuracy on crosstalk that no model matches, and for a one-off session you absolutely cannot lose it has a case. As the default pipeline for a weekly game, the math rules it out before quality enters into it.

Worth knowing if you go looking: Rev's own pricing page now leads with subscription tiers and no longer shows these per-minute figures — they live on the transcription service page, cited below.

Meeting subscriptions: the cap is the price

Subscription tools meter two things — minutes per month and the length of a single conversation — and for D&D the second one decides. Otter does not fit a four-hour session in one recording until its Business plan ($30 per user monthly): the free plan cuts a conversation at 30 minutes and Pro at 90. The full arithmetic is in the Otter comparison.

Notta's free plan caps a conversation at three minutes — not thirty, three — which makes it a demo rather than a tool for this job. Its Pro plan is the quiet value option of the meeting tools: about $13.61 a month (less billed annually) covers 1,800 minutes with a five-hour per-recording cap, which is seven four-hour sessions.

Fireflies advertises unlimited transcription on the free plan, but caps its meeting recorder at two hours on free and Pro, and free storage at 400 minutes per team — less than two sessions retained. It accepts file uploads on every tier but publishes no upload length cap, so treat long-file behaviour as something to test before relying on it.

Doing it yourself with the Whisper API

OpenAI's Whisper API costs $0.006 a minute — $1.44 for a four-hour session, under $6 a month for a weekly game. That is the cheapest accurate transcription available, full stop, and if you are comfortable with a command line it is a real option.

The catches are practical. The API caps files at 25 MB, and four hours at a typical 64 kbps is roughly 115 MB, so you are splitting every session into five or so pieces with ffmpeg and stitching the text back together. The standard model does not label speakers. And it has never seen your campaign's proper nouns, so the same NPC comes back spelled differently each week unless you build and maintain your own prompt — which is fixable, but it is an evening of scripting plus maintenance, not zero. The splitting, the prompt and the speaker problem are all walked through in the Whisper guide.

What we charge, for comparison

DM Scribe is ours, so read this section knowing that. The free plan includes 2.5 hours of transcription a month plus a one-time 3 bonus hours at signup — enough to put one real four-hour session through it in your first month for nothing. After that: $7.99 a month covers 10 hours (about two and a half sessions), $14.99 covers 30 (a weekly game with room to spare), and 5-hour top-up bundles are $4.95, which works out to about a dollar an hour.

The price includes what happens after the transcript — the wiki, the recap, and name-consistent transcription primed with your campaign's own glossary. If all you want is raw text, the Whisper API above is cheaper and we would rather say so than be caught implying otherwise.

The cost that never shows up on an invoice

Every general tool on this page will spell your invented names differently from week to week, and someone — you — fixes that by hand or lives with a transcript that cannot be searched. Ten minutes of find-and-replace a week is nine hours a campaign year. Whatever you pick, weigh the cleanup time with the sticker price; it is usually the bigger number.