Gladia pricing

About

Gladia is a Paris-based speech-to-text and audio intelligence API, founded in 2022 by Jean-Louis Quéguiner (CEO, formerly head of AI at OVHcloud) and Jonathan Soto (CTO). It began as a hosted, production-hardened version of OpenAI’s Whisper — branded Whisper-Zero — that cut hallucinations and added enterprise features, and has since shipped its own Solaria-1 model claiming to remove up to 99% of Whisper’s hallucinations while supporting 100+ languages with automatic language detection and code-switching. The platform offers both asynchronous (batch) transcription and a multilingual real-time streaming engine with under-300ms latency.

Gladia raised a $4M seed in June 2023 (led by New Wave, with Sequoia participating via its Arc program, plus Cocoa) and a $16M Series A in October 2024 led by XAnge, with Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, and others — roughly $20M raised to date. The company positions itself against AssemblyAI, Deepgram, Speechmatics, and the hyperscalers’ STT APIs, and its pricing page claims it is trusted by 300,000+ developers and 5,000+ organizations worldwide.

For the most current information, visit Gladia.

Pricing summary : How Gladia’s pricing model works

Gladia prices on a single, intuitive value metric: the hour of audio processed. There are no seats and no fixed monthly platform fee — you pay for what you transcribe, with a clean split between async (batch) and real-time (streaming) rates because live transcription is more expensive to serve.

Three tiers map to commitment level. Starter is pure pay-as-you-go: $0.61/hour async and $0.75/hour real-time, with 10 free hours every month, 25 async / 30 real-time concurrent requests, and every language and core feature included. Growth trades an upfront usage commitment for sharply lower unit prices — as low as $0.20/hour async and $0.25/hour real-time, roughly 67% cheaper than Starter — plus flexible concurrency, custom volume discounts, and automatic model-training opt-out. Enterprise is a custom-quoted annual plan adding unlimited concurrency, zero data retention, custom hosting, fine-tuning, debundled per-feature pricing, SLAs, and a dedicated account manager.

What makes this different: Gladia keeps every feature and language bundled into the base hourly rate at every paid tier — there’s no per-language or per-feature upsell on Starter/Growth (debundling only appears at Enterprise). The meter is the same unit a buyer already thinks in (hours of audio), and the async-vs-real-time split honestly reflects the cost-to-serve difference rather than hiding it in a flat rate.

Pricing by product

Sales motions across products: self-serve PLG for Starter (sign up and start, 10 free hours, card via Stripe); sales-assisted for Growth (commitment negotiated with the team); and sales-led annual contracts for Enterprise (bank transfer / invoicing available).

Hidden costs : What Gladia users actually pay

Gladia is unusually clean on hidden costs — the page explicitly states no setup fees or hidden costs — but the real bill is shaped by how many hours you process and whether they’re async or real-time. Real-time is ~23% more expensive per hour than async on Starter ($0.75 vs $0.61), so a workload heavy on live streaming costs meaningfully more than the headline async rate implies.

Other things to budget for: concurrency limits on Starter (25 async / 30 real-time) cap throughput — bursting past them requires Growth or Enterprise; the 67% Growth discount is gated behind an upfront commitment, so the cheap rate isn’t available pay-as-you-go; and data-residency / zero-retention controls and custom hosting are Enterprise-only, so compliance-sensitive buyers effectively pay the quoted annual rate.

Want to estimate your own Gladia bill? Use the Gladia pricing calculator to model your costs based on hours of audio and async-vs-real-time mix.

Pricing evolution : Gladia pricing history and changes

Cadence

Tracked range: 2023–present, via Wayback Machine snapshots (2023-06, 2024-04, 2025-02) and a live 2026-06-09 capture.

Notable changes

• 2023-06 — Launches the hosted STT API with a Free plan (10 hours/month included) and a contact-sales Enterprise plan, plus an interactive hours-of-audio calculator. Pay-as-you-go billing via Stripe, no setup fees.
• 2024-04 — Adds a self-serve Pro tier at $0.612/hour async plus $0.144/hour for live (real-time) transcription — the first explicit per-hour self-serve price.
• 2024-10 — $16M Series A (XAnge) and GA of the multilingual real-time engine (under 300ms latency); Pro pricing carried into 2025.
• 2026 — Repackages into Starter / Growth / Enterprise. Real-time becomes its own full per-hour rate ($0.75/hr vs $0.61 async) instead of a $0.144 add-on; new Growth tier offers ~67% volume discounts ($0.20/$0.25 per hour) behind an upfront commitment.

What’s unique : Gladia’s distinctive pricing mechanics

1. One honest value metric: the audio hour. No seats, no platform fee, no per-language or per-feature upsell on the self-serve tiers — you pay per hour transcribed, full stop. That makes Gladia’s bill trivial to forecast from a single input (hours of audio) compared with token- or character-based STT pricing elsewhere.

2. Async and real-time priced separately and transparently. Rather than blending a flat rate, Gladia charges $0.61/hr for batch and $0.75/hr for live, surfacing the genuine cost-to-serve gap. The 2026 move from a $0.144 “live add-on” to a standalone real-time rate made that split explicit.

3. Commitment buys the discount, not the features. The Growth tier’s ~67% price cut is unlocked by an upfront usage commitment — features and languages are identical to Starter. Discounting on volume commitment rather than feature-gating keeps the cheap tier from feeling crippled, while still rewarding predictable demand.

Strengths & weaknesses

Billing UX : Gladia billing controls and transparency

• Billing controls — Self-serve upgrade/downgrade anytime from account settings; cancel whenever and retain access until the end of the billing cycle, after which the account downgrades to the free tier. Billing can be monthly or annual.
• Usage visibility — The dashboard lets you monitor usage and subscription; the public pricing page has historically shipped an interactive hours-of-audio calculator. Rate and hours limits vary by tier; exceeding them means contacting sales to raise the cap rather than auto-overage.
• Payment options — Stripe for cards (Visa, Mastercard) on self-serve plans; bank transfer and invoicing for Enterprise. No setup fees or hidden costs are charged at any tier.

Strategic wins : Why Gladia’s pricing decisions worked

1. Pricing on the unit the buyer already counts

Charging per hour of audio — not per token, character, or API call — matches how transcription buyers (CCaaS, sales-enablement, meeting assistants, media) think about their workload. That made cost modeling trivial and lowered the barrier to a self-serve “just try it” start. See how AI companies structure pricing.

2. Splitting real-time into its own rate

Moving from a blended “$0.612 + $0.144 live” structure to a clean $0.61 async / $0.75 real-time split in 2026 made the more expensive product visibly more expensive — protecting margin on streaming workloads while keeping the cheap batch rate as the headline. Related: choosing the right usage metric.

3. Discounting on commitment, not on capability

The Growth tier rewards predictable volume with a ~67% cut while leaving every feature intact. That avoids the trust-eroding “crippled cheap tier” pattern and converts growing customers into committed ones. Related: outcome-based pricing trends.

Areas to improve : Gaps in Gladia’s pricing approach

1. “As low as” hides the real Growth curve

Growth is advertised as “as low as $0.20/hr,” but the actual rate depends on the size of the commitment, which isn’t published. Buyers can’t self-serve their way to the discount or model it without a sales conversation. See bill shock and cost unpredictability.

2. Real-time premium can surprise live-heavy workloads

Teams that anchor on the $0.61 async headline can be caught out by the 23% higher $0.75 real-time rate once they ship streaming. Making the blended cost more prominent for mixed workloads would reduce surprise.

3. Compliance & data controls gated to Enterprise

Zero data retention, custom hosting, and data residency only arrive at the quoted Enterprise tier — a hurdle for mid-market buyers in regulated verticals who otherwise fit Growth. A self-serve data-residency add-on would widen the funnel.

Key takeaways

1. A single value metric beats clever ones. Pricing per hour of audio makes Gladia’s bill forecastable from one number, lowering the barrier to adoption versus token- or character-based STT.
2. Price the expensive product as expensive. Splitting real-time ($0.75) from async ($0.61) protects streaming margin and signals the cost-to-serve difference honestly.
3. Commitment, not feature-gating, should earn the discount. Growth’s 67% cut is unlocked by upfront volume while keeping features identical — a cleaner incentive than a crippled cheap tier.
4. Bundle features, gate sovereignty. Every language and capability is included on self-serve tiers; only data residency, retention, and hosting controls sit behind Enterprise.
5. Transparency has limits. Public per-hour Starter rates build trust, but “as low as” Growth pricing and quoted Enterprise terms still require a sales motion.

UBP implications

1. Choose the meter your buyer already uses. Hours of audio is intuitive for transcription buyers; aligning the meter with the customer’s mental model reduces friction and disputes. See usage-based pricing strategy.
2. Differentiate rates by cost-to-serve, not just packaging. Async vs real-time pricing reflects real infrastructure cost and keeps the model defensible as volume scales.
3. Use commitments to convert PLG users into predictable revenue. Offering a large volume discount in exchange for an upfront commitment is a clean bridge from self-serve to enterprise without locking features away. See choosing the right usage metric.

Sources

• Gladia pricing page (live capture, accessed 2026-06-09)
• Gladia raises $16M Series A — PR Newswire (accessed 2026-06-09)
• Gladia believes real-time processing is the next frontier — TechCrunch (accessed 2026-06-09)
• Gladia turns any audio into text in near real time — TechCrunch (2023 seed) (accessed 2026-06-09)
• Wayback Machine snapshots: gladia.io/pricing (accessed 2026-06-09) — 2023-06, 2024-04, 2025-02

Bottom line

Gladia is a Paris-based (2022, ~$20M raised through a 2024 $16M Series A) speech-to-text and audio intelligence API that prices on the one unit its buyers already count: the hour of audio. Self-serve Starter is pay-as-you-go at $0.61/hour async and $0.75/hour real-time with 10 free hours monthly; the commitment-based Growth plan drops rates to as low as $0.20/$0.25 per hour (~67% off); and Enterprise is a quoted annual contract adding unlimited concurrency, zero data retention, custom hosting, and SLAs. Every language and feature is bundled on the self-serve tiers — only sovereignty controls sit behind Enterprise. Browse the pricing blueprint for more fully-researched company profiles.

Want to compare Gladia against other speech and audio AI companies like Deepgram, AssemblyAI, or Speechmatics? Browse the pricing blueprint.

Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis

Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.

Starter / Growth / Enterprise restructure

Jun 2026

Repackaged into three tiers: Starter pay-as-you-go ($0.61/hr async, $0.75/hr real-time, 10h free, 25 async / 30 real-time concurrent requests); Growth commitment-based (as low as $0.20/hr async, $0.25/hr real-time — 67% off Starter, flexible concurrency, model-training opt-out); and Enterprise (custom annual, unlimited concurrency, zero data retention, custom hosting, SLAs). Real-time became its own full per-hour rate rather than a live add-on.

Series A + real-time engine GA

Oct 2024

Gladia raises a $16M Series A led by XAnge and launches its multilingual real-time transcription engine (under 300ms latency). Pro pricing structure ($0.612/hr async + $0.144/hr live) carried through into 2025.

Pro plan added — $0.612/hr async + $0.144/hr live

Apr 2024

Introduced a self-serve 'Pro' tier at $0.612/hour for async transcription, plus an additional $0.144/hour for live (real-time) transcription. Free (10h/month) and Enterprise tiers retained. First explicit per-hour self-serve pricing.

Launch — Free tier + Enterprise, usage calculator

Jun 2023

Gladia launches its hosted Whisper-based STT API with a Free plan (10 hours/month included) and a contact-sales Enterprise plan. Pricing page features an interactive hours-of-audio calculator; pay-as-you-go billing via Stripe, no setup fees. Coincides with a $4M seed round (New Wave, Sequoia via Arc, Cocoa).