Deepgram

Our full take

Deepgram started as a speech-to-text company, and it shows in the pricing. The Voice Agent API takes the three pieces a phone agent needs, the speech-to-text, the language model and the voice, and bills them as one number instead of three separate meters. On the Standard tier that number is about $0.075 a minute, which is among the lowest all-in rates of any serious platform.

The trade you make for that price is the phone line. Deepgram does not bring its own telephony, so you wire up Twilio yourself and pay Twilio separately, usually around $0.014 a minute on top. For a developer that is a small job. For a non-technical buyer who wants to plug in and go, it is real setup work, and worth knowing before you compare the headline rate to an all-in platform like Vapi or Retell.

If you want to spend even less, the cheaper tiers let you bring your own language model or your own voice engine (ElevenLabs, Cartesia and AWS Polly all plug straight in), which drops Deepgram’s cut to about $0.041 a minute on the Growth plan. You then pay the outside model or voice on top, so the saving is smaller than it first looks, but the flexibility is genuine.

The voices come from Deepgram’s own Aura-2 engine, with the older Aura-1 still available at half the per-character price for anything where top quality is not the point. Narration runs about $0.030 per 1,000 characters on Aura-2, competitive but not the cheapest. The real limit is reach: seven languages and no documented voice cloning, so if you need to sound local in twenty markets, or clone a specific brand voice, this is not the tool.

One pricing habit to watch before you budget from the rate card. As of our 23 July 2026 capture, the streaming transcription rates are labelled limited-time promotional, with the list price struck through beside them: Nova-3 runs $0.0048 a minute on promo against a list of $0.0077, and a footnote says the listed rates also assume you opt in to Deepgram’s Model Improvement Program, which shares your audio to train its models. We store the list rates on this page. The promo is real money while it lasts, but a budget built on it inherits both an expiry date and a data-sharing condition.

Where Deepgram is unusually strong is the compliance paperwork. Its own trust page states SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement on request, plus GDPR and PCI, and now names CCPA and an EU endpoint too. That is more than several flashier competitors can show in writing, and it matters if you are in healthcare or finance. The company underneath it is well capitalised: a $130 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation announced 13 January 2026 (which also folded in OfOne, a drive-through voice AI), and a July 2026 deal putting Nova-3 on-device on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips. Neither changes what you pay today, but both matter if you are betting a production stack on the supplier still being here in five years.

The 1 to 10 scores on this page are an editorial preview, our provisional read to get the framework in place, not a measured result. We have not run Deepgram through our own call tests yet, so there is no Voxrater latency figure here. The pricing, voice and compliance detail is sourced from Deepgram’s pricing, product and trust pages, first captured 2026-05-31 and most recently re-captured 2026-07-23.