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- Modulate just made transcription 10x cheaper
Modulate just made transcription 10x cheaper
The transcription API that quietly outperforms Deepgram on every benchmark that matters.
Ihtesham Haider & Hasan Toor
May 06, 2026
Transcription pricing has been a quiet scam for years.
Most APIs charge $0.30 to $0.50 per hour and still deliver word error rates that force you to clean up output manually before shipping.
Modulate just broke the entire pricing model.
$0.03 per hour for batch. $0.06 per hour for streaming. That's 10x cheaper than every major competitor running today.
But the cost isn't even the wildest part.
Modulate has the lowest word error rate across 3 leading transcription benchmarks, averaging 35% fewer errors than Deepgram. Cheaper AND more accurate is not a tradeoff anyone else is offering right now.
The feature stack is built for production apps that work with real-world audio:
→ Emotion detection
→ Accent detection
→ Speaker diarization
→ PII redaction
→ 50+ languages supported
→ Deepfake detection built in
If you're building anything that touches voice, podcasts, customer calls, meeting notes, or video content, this is the API you want sitting in your stack.
You can take it for a full test drive with 400 free hours and no credit card required.
Prohuman team
Covers emerging technology, AI models, and the people building the next layer of the internet. |  Founder |
Writes about how new interfaces, reasoning models, and automation are reshaping human work. |  Founder |
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