Transcribe a Podcast

We read the free tiers of six other transcription tools off their own pricing pages and put them in one table — longest free file, whether they label speakers, whether you need an account, and what happens when the free part runs out. It includes where we lose, because a comparison that does not is an advertisement.

Every other free transcriber stops somewhere between ten and thirty minutes. That number is not chosen around what podcasters record; it is chosen around what is cheap to give away, and it means the free tier is useless for the thing most people want to use it for.

We had a way to check. Slice transcribes episodes for a living, so we measured our own, on 16 September 2026 — 96 transcripts made between February and September 2026, aggregate figures only, no customer file, name or content in them:

• Median length: 47.3 minutes. Half of everything longer than that.
• Mean: 44.5 minutes. 90th percentile: 72 minutes.
• The longest was 93.6 minutes.
• Only 17% were 15 minutes or under. A fifteen-minute free tier would have failed five episodes in six.
• Average 7,775 words at about 172 words a minute; 94% audio rather than video.

One hour is where the evidence and the budget meet: it takes a typical episode with room to spare, and it is a length we can afford to hand out. If your show runs longer, the tool says so before it uploads anything, tells you the length it read, and offers hours for the whole file, up to 3 hours.

What it costs us, said out loud

About 15 cents an hour of audio, which we pay. That is why there are two free recordings a month per person and a monthly budget for the tool as a whole. When a month runs out the tool says so and offers to email you when it resets — it does not quietly get worse or start asking for a card.

The limitation that matters most for interview shows

There are no speaker labels. You get everything both people said, in paragraphs, with nothing marking the handover. For search, notes, quote-hunting and accessibility that is genuinely fine. For a transcript you intend to publish as an interview, it is a first draft with an editing pass in front of it. Diarisation is a paid feature, and pretending otherwise here would only waste your afternoon.

What to do with it next

The chapter formatter turns timestamps into the chapter markers Apple and Spotify read. The subtitle converter reshapes the SRT if a platform wants something else. And if you want the clips as well as the words — the bits worth posting, cut and captioned — that is what Slice Shorts does, and it is the paid thing this free tool is honestly a doorway to. Not sure which bits are worth it? The podcast clip finder reads your feed and picks the episode’s three best moments for free.