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Whisper Pricing

freeopen source · MITlast verified September 6, 2026official site ↗

At a glance

100% open-source speech recognition and transcription model released by OpenAI under the MIT License ($0 software cost). Model weights (tiny to large-v3 and large-v3-turbo) and inference code can be self-hosted locally or on private cloud infrastructure without licensing fees or usage metering. Optional hosted API inference is available via OpenAI API at standard audio token rates ($0.006/minute).

Self-hosting cost

Whisper is open source under the MIT license. Self-hosting does not add a software license fee, but you still pay for infrastructure, operations, and any external model or API usage.

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same category, free plan or open-source license

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FAQ

How much does Whisper cost?

100% open-source speech recognition and transcription model released by OpenAI under the MIT License ($0 software cost). Model weights (tiny to large-v3 and large-v3-turbo) and inference code can be self-hosted locally or on private cloud infrastructure without licensing fees or usage metering. Optional hosted API inference is available via OpenAI API at standard audio token rates ($0.006/minute). Paid pricing starts at $0.006/minute.

Does Whisper have a free plan?

Yes — Whisper is completely free.

Can you self-host Whisper for free?

Whisper is open source under the MIT license. Self-hosting does not add a software license fee, but you still pay for infrastructure, operations, and any external model or API usage.

What are free or cheaper Whisper alternatives?

Ray, LLaMA-Factory, Tavily are in the same category with a free plan or open-source license.

pricing is editorial catalog data (last verified September 6, 2026) — vendors change plans; confirm on the official site before you buy. Reuse this data under CC-BY 4.0 via /data.