Pay for Soniox

The API is priced by usage, not by subscription. Soniox lists speech-to-text at about $0.10 per hour of audio for file (async) transcription and about $0.12 per hour for real-time streaming. Under the hood the bill is counted in tokens — $1.50 per million audio tokens for async and $2.00 for real-time, plus $3.50 or $4.00 per million text tokens — but the hourly figures are the easy way to estimate. Translation is included in the same real-time call at no extra cost. Text-to-speech is also token-based and works out to about $0.70 per hour of generated speech. Prices were read from soniox.com/pricing in September 2026; Soniox notes that enterprise and committed-use pricing can differ.

Billing works from a prepaid balance. In the Soniox Console you open Billing, add funds with your card, and each request draws the balance down. When the balance reaches zero, the API stops accepting requests with an "organization balance exhausted" error until you top up again — and failed async jobs are not retried automatically, so you have to resubmit them. You can also turn on autopay, which charges your saved card when the balance runs low. With a prepaid Mehbit card that only works if the card has money on it, so either keep it funded or leave autopay off and top up by hand.

New accounts no longer get free API credits: Soniox stopped them in October 2025 because of abuse, so plan on adding funds before your first real request. Soniox does not publish a minimum top-up on its public pages; the Console shows the options when you add funds. The Console also lets you set a monthly budget cap for the organisation, which is a useful safety net if a bug in your code starts sending far more audio than you expected.

If you only want to transcribe your own meetings or translate conversations, the Soniox App is the simpler choice. Its Free plan gives weekly credits that refresh automatically. Pro is listed at $19.99 a month, or $120 a year when billed yearly, and removes the limits on transcription, translation and AI actions. Business is for teams, with seat management and shared workspaces, at $30 per user per month billed monthly and less when billed annually. Soniox notes the final price may vary with local taxes or currency conversion. If you subscribe inside the iPhone or Android app, the purchase may be billed by Apple or Google instead of Soniox — subscribe on the web if you want to pay with your Mehbit card.

Two points from Soniox’s terms are worth knowing before you pay. Fees are non-refundable except where the terms or the law say otherwise, so top up in amounts you expect to use. And Soniox is a US company: its terms require you to confirm that you are not located in, or ordinarily resident in, a country under comprehensive sanctions — Iran is one of those countries — and forbid use that breaks export-control or sanctions laws. Read the terms and make sure your use complies before you rely on the service.