PlainScribe
PlainScribe is an AI transcription and translation service for audio and video files, priced at USD 4 per audio hour with prepaid credits and no subscription. It covers 47 languages and deletes transcripts after 30 days.
What is PlainScribe?
PlainScribe is an AI transcription and translation platform for audio and video files, built around a single commercial idea: there is no subscription. The site puts it bluntly against its rivals — "What makes PlainScribe different from Otter, Rev, Descript, Sonix, and the rest is that there is no subscription." You buy prepaid credits instead, one credit covering one hour of audio at USD 4.00, or USD 0.067 per minute. Top-ups run from USD 10 to USD 500 in whole dollars, with bonus credits of 5%, 10% and 15% at the USD 50, 100 and 250 thresholds, and purchased credits stay valid for one year. New accounts receive 30 free minutes without a payment card. Six services sit under one account: audio transcription, video transcription, translation, subtitles, AI summaries and text-to-speech. The engine covers 47 languages with automatic detection, at the same price whichever one you use. Announced accuracy reaches 99% on clean audio, while the FAQ gives a more candid 95-99% range depending on recording quality, accents and technical vocabulary. Seventeen input formats are accepted, from MP3 and MP4 to FLAC, MKV and OPUS, with a 200 MB ceiling per file on the web. Speaker diarisation and timestamps are included, a built-in editor lets you correct the text before export, and every export format — TXT, CSV, SRT, VTT, JSON — is free for all users. Processing takes roughly a third to a half of the media's duration. Privacy is a default rather than an option: uploaded media are removed after processing and transcripts are purged automatically after 30 days, for everyone. A desktop application for macOS, Windows and Linux, presented as a USD 49 value, is unlocked with the first credit purchase; it transcribes entirely locally, offline, with no account and no meter, and is the answer PlainScribe offers for confidential recordings. The limits are stated as openly as the strengths: no public API, no mobile app, no live transcription, no bot joining video calls, and a comparison page that concedes where Otter, Rev, Sonix, TurboScribe or Descript do the job better.
What it does
- Transcribe audio recordings into timestamped text
- Transcribe video files and extract the spoken dialogue
- Translate across 47 languages with automatic language detection
- Generate timestamped SRT and VTT subtitle files
- Summarise a recording into key points, action items and chapters
- Identify and label individual speakers through diarisation
- Convert text into speech, including full audiobook generation
When to use PlainScribe / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if PlainScribe is the right fit.
When to use PlainScribe
- Occasional or irregular users, below roughly 150 minutes a month, for whom a monthly subscription would sit unused
- Journalists recording field interviews, including sensitive material that can stay on their own machine with the offline desktop app
- Academic researchers transcribing qualitative interviews, focus groups and ethnographic fieldwork
- Students turning recorded lectures into searchable revision notes at a predictable per-hour cost
- Podcasters and video creators producing show notes, timestamped SRT and VTT subtitles and translated captions
When not to use PlainScribe
- Teams that need live, real-time transcription during meetings: no bot joins calls and nothing is transcribed as it is spoken
- Heavy, regular users: the site itself states that beyond roughly 30 audio hours a year an unlimited competitor plan costs less
- Anyone who needs human transcription or human review for complex or poor-quality audio, which PlainScribe does not offer
- Developers and product teams looking for a public API, a mobile app, built-in video editing or enterprise features such as SSO and team management
- Organisations bound by strict EU data protection requirements: no GDPR statement, no data processing agreement, no declared hosting country, no postal address and no email address
How to use PlainScribe
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account: 30 minutes of free transcription are credited, with no payment card required
- Drag and drop an audio or video file into the browser, up to 200 MB per file
- Let the language be detected automatically, with no setting to configure
- Wait roughly a third to a half of the recording's duration: a 60-minute file takes about 20 to 30 minutes
- Add a translation, an AI summary or subtitles to the same file in one click
- Correct the text in the built-in editor: typos, punctuation and speaker labels
- Export in TXT, CSV, SRT, VTT or JSON, all formats free for every user
- Delete the transcript from the dashboard, or let the automatic 30-day purge handle it
- Top up any whole amount from USD 10 to keep going; the first purchase unlocks the desktop app permanently
- Install the desktop app for macOS, Windows or Linux and drop files into it for unlimited offline transcription, no account needed
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No subscription at all: prepaid credits only, nothing to cancel, no per-seat fee and no monthly quota that expires unused
- Low, legible pricing at USD 4.00 per audio hour (USD 0.067 per minute), down to USD 3.48 with the largest volume bonus, and 30 free minutes to test without a card
- Privacy applied by default to everyone: media deleted after processing, transcripts purged automatically after 30 days, free trial included
- Offline desktop application, presented as a USD 49 value, given from the first credit purchase, so sensitive audio never leaves the machine
- 47 languages at the same price with automatic detection, no surcharge for non-English recordings
- Diarisation, AI summaries, the editor and every export format included, with nothing paywalled behind a higher tier
- Unusual editorial transparency: subprocessors named one by one, the limits of training opt-out admitted, and competitors credited by name where they win
Cons
- No mention of the GDPR anywhere on the site, no data processing agreement and no EU representative under Article 27
- No postal address and no email address published: the only channel is a contact form that itself warns it is "not a chat bot or a live customer support service"
- No hosting country or region declared, and no certification claimed such as SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA
- The publisher cannot guarantee that its subprocessors exclude your files from training their own models, and offers no client-side opt-out
- No public API, no mobile application, no live transcription and no meeting-bot integration
- Web uploads capped at 200 MB per file, a USD 10 minimum purchase, credits expiring after one year and a desktop app locked behind that first purchase
- Inconsistencies on the site itself: the services page announces 15 free minutes in one paragraph and 30 in its own FAQ, and the home page lists Chinese among the languages while the official 47-language list does not include it
Pricing & Plans
There is no free plan and no subscription: PlainScribe is sold as prepaid credits, one credit covering one hour of audio at USD 4.00 per audio hour, or USD 0.067 per minute. New accounts receive 30 minutes of free transcription without a payment card. Top-ups accept any whole amount from USD 10 to USD 500, USD 10 buying 2.5 credits, that is 2 hours and 30 minutes of audio. Volume bonuses of 5% from USD 50, 10% from USD 100 and 15% from USD 250 bring the effective rate down to USD 3.48 per hour. Purchased credits remain valid for one year. VAT or local tax is added at payment where the law requires it, without reducing the credits received. There are no setup fees, no processing fees and no per-seat charges, and payment is made by Visa, Mastercard or American Express through Stripe. The desktop application, presented as a USD 49 value, is unlocked with the first credit purchase.
- 30 minutes of transcription for a new account
- no payment card required
- one time only
- 2.5 credits
- 2 h 30 of audio
- USD 4.00 per hour
- 6.25 credits
- 6 h 15 of audio
- USD 4.00 per hour
- 13.13 credits including a 5% bonus
- 13 h 08 of audio
- USD 3.81 per hour
- 27.5 credits including a 10% bonus
- 27 h 30 of audio
- USD 3.64 per hour
- 71.88 credits including a 15% bonus
- 71 h 53 of audio
- USD 3.48 per hour
- any whole amount between USD 10 and USD 500
- added to a single credit balance valid for one year
- quoted on request through the contact form
- with higher file size limits
- priority processing
- dedicated support
- enhanced security options and custom integrations
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how PlainScribe handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere on the PlainScribe website: not in the privacy policy, not in the terms, not on any other page checked. No EU representative under Article 27 is designated, no data protection officer is named, and no data processing agreement is published or offered. No legal basis, no response time and no right of access, rectification or portability is described, and no legal or privacy email address exists — the only channel is the contact form. The single indirect reference to the European Union concerns advertising: the privacy policy notes that non-personalised ads are used in the EU with Google AdSense. On the factual side, retention rules are stated and favourable: media deleted after processing, transcripts purged automatically after 30 days. PlainScribe, Inc. is a US company, its named subprocessors are mostly American, and no hosting country or region is declared.
Who owns the data?
The terms of service contain no clause transferring ownership of uploaded files or transcripts, and neither the terms nor the privacy policy claims any right over that content: the material stays yours. Accounts are created through Clerk, which collects an email address and a password. Uploaded audio and video are removed after processing, transcripts are kept for a maximum of 30 days and then deleted automatically, and you can delete any transcript yourself from the dashboard at any time. The publisher states plainly that it does not sell your data. The qualification sits upstream: files sent to the cloud service pass through named third-party providers whose own terms then govern what happens to them.
Reuse rights
Nothing in the terms restricts what you do with your own transcripts. Exports in TXT, CSV, SRT, VTT and JSON are available to every user at no extra cost, and no permission is required to edit, publish, translate or resell the output. The trade-off is upstream. In the cloud service, media and transcripts pass through subprocessors that PlainScribe names one by one: Deepgram (primary speech-to-text), AssemblyAI (fallback), Google Gemini (summaries, notes, translation), OpenAI, AWS Polly and fal.ai (voice synthesis and audiobooks), AWS S3 (temporary storage), Supabase (database), Upstash (queues, cache, rate limiting), Clerk (authentication), Stripe (payment), SendGrid and Knock (email and notifications). The privacy policy warns that these providers may retain, process or use the data passed to them, including to improve or train their own models, and that PlainScribe makes a reasonable effort to opt out where a provider allows it but cannot guarantee it in every case. Device information is also collected — browser, IP address, time zone, cookies, pages viewed, referrer — alongside anonymised analytics cookies and Google AdSense, with non-personalised advertising served in the EU. Order data such as name, billing address, payment method, email and phone number is collected at purchase, though card details are never stored on PlainScribe's own servers. The documented way around all of this is the desktop application, which transcribes locally and sends nothing to any third party.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
PlainScribe declares no hosting country and no hosting region anywhere on its site. What it does name is its infrastructure: uploaded media are stored temporarily on Amazon Web Services (S3) during processing, accounts and transcripts sit in a Supabase database, queues, cache and rate limiting run on Upstash, authentication is handled by Clerk and payment by Stripe. Speech-to-text and AI features are subcontracted to Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Google Gemini, OpenAI, AWS Polly and fal.ai. These providers are American or US-headquartered, PlainScribe, Inc. is a US company, and the domain is registered through an American registrar. A DNS lookup returns 216.150.16.65, geolocated in the United States on AS16509 (Amazon.com); this is an anycast node and proves nothing about where the data itself resides. In short, the processing chain is named provider by provider, but the jurisdiction is not, and there is no data residency option, no data processing agreement and no certification to rely on. The exception is the desktop application, which transcribes on the user's own machine and moves no file off it.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting PlainScribe.
- Files sent to the cloud pass through third-party providers that may use them to train their own models; PlainScribe requests opt-out where possible but cannot guarantee it, so genuinely confidential recordings belong in the offline desktop app
- No GDPR mention, no data processing agreement and no Article 27 EU representative: a blocking point for anyone processing personal or sensitive data in Europe, such as interviews with sources, patients or clients
- No hosting country declared and no certification claimed, so you cannot document where your recordings are processed if an employer, client or auditor asks
- No postal address and no email address: in a dispute your only recourse is a contact form that explicitly is not live customer support
- Purchased credits expire one year after purchase and unused balance is lost, so large top-ups should match real expected volume
- Announced accuracy of up to 99% drops towards 95% on poor audio, strong accents or technical vocabulary; an unchecked transcript should never be treated as a verbatim record in legal, medical or journalistic work, and habitually skipping the review step erodes the very listening skills the tool is meant to save
- The site contradicts itself in places, on free minutes (15 versus 30) and on Chinese being supported, so claims are worth checking against the languages page and the FAQ before committing budget
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. The web app needs no installation and no configuration: create an account, drag an audio or video file into the browser, and the language is detected automatically. There is no API key to generate, no connector to authorise and no technical setting to adjust. The desktop application is a standard download for macOS, Windows or Linux and requires no account once installed. Seven side tools, such as the converters and calculators, work without any account at all. The only real constraint is the 200 MB per file cap on web uploads, which larger recordings must work around.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind PlainScribe
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement PlainScribe.
Frequently asked questions
How much does PlainScribe cost?
Is there a free trial or a free plan?
Do the credits expire?
How many languages are supported?
How accurate are the transcripts?
Which file formats are accepted, and is there a size limit?
How long does a transcription take?
How long are my files kept?
Is my data used to train AI models?
Is there an API, a mobile app or email support?
Should you pick PlainScribe?
PlainScribe occupies a niche it makes no attempt to leave: file-by-file transcription paid by the hour, not a collaborative meeting suite. For irregular use, the arithmetic is hard to argue with — USD 4.00 an audio hour, 30 free minutes to test without a card, no subscription to cancel and no feature paywalled behind a higher tier. The site itself draws the line where that stops being true: heavy monthly users, teams needing live transcription, SSO or video editing, and anyone above roughly 30 audio hours a year are pointed towards named competitors. Two things genuinely set it apart. Transcripts are purged automatically after 30 days for every account, free trial included, rather than being an enterprise privilege. And the desktop application, given with the first credit purchase, transcribes entirely on the user's own machine, which is a real answer for journalists, lawyers and researchers handling recordings that should never reach a third-party server. The weakness is structural and deserves weighing. There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere on the site, no data processing agreement, no EU representative, no declared hosting country and no certification. There is no postal address and no email address either: the only channel is a contact form that warns it is not live support. For a US company whose subprocessors may use data to train their own models, an outcome PlainScribe admits it cannot guarantee against, that silence weighs more than it otherwise would. The result is a tool of unusual editorial honesty and unusually thin legal identity. Excellent value for occasional and personal use; for regulated professional workflows, either stay on the offline desktop app or ask the publisher, in writing, the questions its website does not answer.
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