Transcription Service: Cost at 500 Hours/Month
What does it cost to run transcription service at 500 hours/month? Self-hosted dedicated GPU vs API provider pricing.
Monthly Cost Comparison at 500 hours/month
| Provider | Monthly Cost | Pricing Model | vs GigaGPU |
|---|---|---|---|
| GigaGPU (RTX 3090) | £89/mo | Fixed | — |
| OpenAI Whisper API | £300/mo | Per-hours | 70% cheaper with GigaGPU |
| AWS Transcribe | £720/mo | Per-hours | 88% cheaper with GigaGPU |
| Google Cloud STT | £480/mo | Per-hours | 81% cheaper with GigaGPU |
Where the API Cost Curve Breaks
Your call centre records 500 hours of customer conversations every month. On OpenAI Whisper, that is £300/mo. On AWS Transcribe, £720/mo. On Google Cloud STT, £480/mo. A dedicated RTX 3090 on GigaGPU costs £89/month regardless of volume — that is a 70-88% reduction depending on which API you are replacing.
At this volume, the economics are unambiguous. The cheapest API option (OpenAI at £300/mo) still costs more than three times what dedicated hardware runs. And every additional hour above 500 is free on your own server, while it adds £0.60-£1.44 per hour with APIs.
Annual savings potential: Up to £7,572 per year compared to the most expensive API option, assuming consistent 500 hours/month usage.
The Operational Advantages
- Compliance without compromise: Financial services and healthcare mandates often prohibit sending audio to third-party servers. Self-hosted transcription satisfies GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 requirements by design.
- Consistent throughput: No API rate limits means you can batch-process overnight backlogs or handle peak call volumes without throttling.
- Custom vocabulary: Fine-tune Whisper on your domain — product names, industry terms, internal jargon — for significantly higher accuracy than generic APIs.
- Latency control: Direct GPU access delivers sub-100ms inference times, enabling real-time transcription pipelines without API round-trip overhead.
When APIs Still Make Sense
- Highly variable workloads: If your volume swings between 50 and 500 hours unpredictably, pay-per-use avoids paying for idle capacity during quiet months.
- Multi-provider redundancy: Some teams use APIs as a fallback alongside self-hosted primary infrastructure.
- Rapid language expansion: Testing transcription quality across 50+ languages before committing to production deployment.
Recommended Hardware
The RTX 3090 at £89/month provides the 24 GB VRAM needed for Whisper Large v3 at full precision, with enough throughput for 500 hours/month and 20-30% burst headroom. Pre-configured with CUDA, Docker, and inference frameworks — deploy in under 15 minutes.
Cut Your Transcription Bill by 70-88%
Replace per-hour API billing with flat-rate GPU hosting. Process 500 hours/month for £89 — every hour included.
