Short, practical pieces on getting speech into text: formats, accuracy, privacy, and what your laptop can actually run. Every price is dated and every claim is tested on our own files.
What an hour of transcription really costs on Otter, Rev, Descript, the cloud APIs behind them, and a model running on your own laptop. Prices checked September 2026.
Read the articleAn SRT file is four lines of plain text per subtitle. Here is the exact format, three ways to make one, the timing rules broadcasters use, and the small mistakes that make YouTube or VLC reject the file.
Three exports, three jobs. A short decision table for transcripts and subtitles.
Free transcription tiers stop at 30, 45 or 60 minutes for a reason you can calculate. Here is what a free user costs, what an ad pays, and why moving the work onto your own computer changes the answer.