---
title: "Credits calculator"
description: "Work out what your credits cover: transcription hours, Meeting Assistant time, translation characters and AI Chat questions on standard and premium models."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.speakai.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Credits calculator

Every action in Speak AI draws on one credit balance, so the useful question is not "how many
credits do I have" but "what does that buy". This page gives you the rates and the arithmetic to
answer that before you spend anything.

If you want the concepts first (what credits are, where to check your balance, what happens when
you run low), read [credits and usage](/help/account/credits/).

## What one credit buys

| What you do | One credit gets you |
| --- | --- |
| Transcribe uploaded audio or video | 1 hour |
| Transcribe with the Azure or AWS engines | 40 minutes |
| Record a meeting with the Meeting Assistant | 30 minutes |
| Translate a transcript | about 16,700 characters |
| Analyze text notes | 100 notes |
| Import a YouTube video | 20 imports |
| Ask AI Chat a question | about 10 questions |

Transcription bills by the minute and is never rounded up to the hour, so a 12-minute file costs
0.2 credits, not a whole one.

## What a balance covers

Pick the row closest to your balance. Every column assumes you spend the whole balance on that
one thing, so treat these as ceilings rather than a budget you can hit all at once.

| Credits | Transcription | Meeting Assistant | Translation | AI Chat questions |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 2 (the [free trial](/help/account/free-trial/)) | 2 hours | 1 hour | 33,000 characters | 20 |
| 10 | 10 hours | 5 hours | 167,000 characters | 100 |
| 25 | 25 hours | 12 hours 30 minutes | 417,000 characters | 250 |
| 100 | 100 hours | 50 hours | 1,670,000 characters | 1,000 |

The AI Chat column uses the cautious planning rate of 0.1 credits a question, which is the same
figure your Usage screen shows. What a question actually costs depends on the model.

## AI Chat: standard versus premium models

Speak charges a chat question on what the model itself costs, so the gap between a standard model
and a premium one is large. These are averages measured over 30 days of real Speak traffic, not
list prices.

| Model | Tier | Credits a question | Questions per 10 credits |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | Standard | about 0.04 | about 250 |
| GPT-5.5 | Premium | about 0.63 | about 16 |
| Claude Sonnet | Premium | about 0.75 | about 13 |
| Claude Opus | Premium | about 1.20 | about 8 |

A long question that sends a large transcript to the model costs more than a short one, and a
short one costs less, so read these as typical rather than fixed.

> **The free tier is locked to the standard model**
>
> On the free trial and the free tier, AI Chat runs on Gemini 2.5 Flash. Premium models appear in
> the model picker with a lock and open up when you upgrade, so a trial balance always buys the
> standard-model rate.

## Work out what a specific job costs

Three formulas cover almost everything:

- **Transcription:** minutes of audio ÷ 60. Use ÷ 40 on the Azure or AWS engines.
- **Meeting Assistant:** minutes of meeting ÷ 30.
- **Translation:** characters ÷ 16,700. If you only know the length of the recording, a minute of
  speech is roughly 800 characters.

A worked example. You have a 45-minute interview and you want it transcribed, translated, and
then a handful of questions asked about it on the standard model:

| Step | Arithmetic | Credits |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Transcribe 45 minutes | 45 ÷ 60 | 0.75 |
| Translate the transcript | 45 × 800 = 36,000 characters, ÷ 16,700 | 2.16 |
| Ask 10 questions on Gemini 2.5 Flash | 10 × 0.04 | 0.40 |
| **Total** | | **about 3.3** |

Run the same interview through Claude Opus instead of Gemini and those 10 questions cost about
12 credits on their own, which is four times the rest of the job put together.

## Pay-As-You-Go doubles every rate

On the Pay-As-You-Go plan every credit rate on this page doubles, so a credit buys half as much:
30 minutes of transcription instead of an hour, 15 minutes of Meeting Assistant instead of 30.
Halve every figure in the tables above and you have your answer.

## What does not draw on credits

Reviewing transcripts, reading insights, sharing, and exporting are free. Only processing new work
costs credits, so you can go back through everything you have already made as often as you like.

Re-transcribing a file is new work: it runs the whole pipeline again and charges again.

For current credit amounts and per-seat pricing, see
[speakai.co/pricing](https://speakai.co/pricing/?utm_source=docs&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=help).

---
Related: [Credits and usage](/help/account/credits/) · [Free trial](/help/account/free-trial/) ·
[Plans and pricing](/help/account/plans/) · [Payment methods](/help/account/payment-methods/)

Source: https://docs.speakai.co/help/account/credits-calculator/index.mdx