Gladia Starter $0.61 per hour vs Sume STT $0.60 per hour

Gladia's pricing page lists its Starter plan at $0.61 per hour for asynchronous transcription and $0.75 per hour for real-time, with 50 euros of free credits. Sume STT 1.0 is $0.01 per audio minute, which is $0.60 per hour. At list price the two are within a cent of each other, so the choice is about the shape of the product, not the rate.

Gladia also lists a Growth tier as low as $0.20 per hour async, so the Starter number is not its floor.

Side by side

All Gladia figures are from its own pricing page, read on 2026-10-02.

What you get from Sume

Sume STT takes a public HTTPS audio_url, an optional language_code, and a duration_seconds hint of 1 to 600. It returns text and word-level words[] with start and end times, and a sentence segmentation mode that returns caption-line shaped segments.

The same API key also runs captions, timeline audio and music, so a transcript can feed POST /v1/video-captions as words without another vendor.

import os, requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/stt-1.0/transcribe",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SUME_API_KEY']}",
             "Idempotency-Key": "stt-demo-001"},
    json={"audio_url": "https://example.com/call.mp3",
          "language_code": "en",
          "duration_seconds": 300},
)
print(r.status_code, r.json())

Where Gladia is the better fit

If you need real-time streaming transcription, Sume does not offer it today; Gladia lists it. If your volume qualifies for a lower tier, Gladia's published floor is well under Sume's single rate.

If your workload is batch files inside a media pipeline, Sume's parity price plus the shared job model is the reason to stay put.

Worked example

Compare a month of calls. The figures use Gladia's Starter async rate and Sume's per-minute rate, nothing else.

• 100 hours: Gladia Starter $61.00, Sume STT $60.00.
• 1,000 hours: Gladia $610.00, Sume $600.00.
• Gladia's Growth tier, listed as low as $0.20 per hour, would be $200.00 for 1,000 hours if you qualify.

Checklist before you commit

Because the entry-tier prices are this close, concurrency and the surrounding workflow decide it. Gladia's page lists 25 concurrent async jobs on Starter; Sume's limits are described in its docs and by your workspace.

• Ask whether you need real-time: only Gladia lists it.
• Test a call with two speakers on each service and check how the output names them.
• Confirm your language is covered; Gladia's page lists 100+ languages.