Transcription Service: Cost at 5000 Hours/Month
What does it cost to run transcription service at 5,000 hours/month? Self-hosted dedicated GPU vs API provider pricing.
Monthly Cost Comparison at 5,000 hours/month
| Provider | Monthly Cost | Pricing Model | vs GigaGPU |
|---|---|---|---|
| GigaGPU (2x RTX 5090) | £358/mo | Fixed | — |
| OpenAI Whisper API | £3000/mo | Per-hours | 88% cheaper with GigaGPU |
| AWS Transcribe | £7200/mo | Per-hours | 95% cheaper with GigaGPU |
| Google Cloud STT | £4800/mo | Per-hours | 93% cheaper with GigaGPU |
Enterprise Transcription: The £82K Annual Gap
Five thousand hours of audio per month is enterprise territory — a national telecom processing call recordings, a government agency digitising decades of archives, or a transcription service provider running production workloads for dozens of clients. At this scale, API pricing is not just expensive — it is structurally uncompetitive.
AWS Transcribe quotes £7,200/month for this volume. A 2x RTX 5090 configuration on GigaGPU costs £358/month. That is a 95% cost reduction, or £6,842 returned to your budget every single month. Even the cheapest API (OpenAI at £3,000/mo) costs 8.4x more than dedicated hardware.
Annual savings potential: Up to £82,104 per year compared to the most expensive API option, assuming consistent 5,000 hours/month usage.
Why Enterprise Teams Self-Host at Scale
- Cost that scales flat: Your 5,001st hour costs nothing extra. On AWS Transcribe, it costs another £1.44. Multiply that by thousands of hours of growth and the gap compounds.
- Full pipeline ownership: Run transcription, diarisation, summarisation, and translation on the same GPU cluster — no data leaving your infrastructure at any stage.
- SLA control: You define your own uptime guarantees and failover strategy rather than depending on a third-party provider’s availability.
- Regulatory compliance: At enterprise volume, every hour of audio contains sensitive data. Self-hosting eliminates third-party data processing risk entirely.
Limited Cases for API Usage at This Scale
- Overflow capacity: Using APIs as burst overflow during seasonal peaks while dedicated hardware handles baseline volume.
- Multi-region latency requirements: When audio originates from 20+ countries and sub-50ms regional latency is mandatory.
- Vendor-mandated integrations: Some enterprise contracts require specific cloud provider transcription for compliance certification.
Recommended Configuration
A 2x RTX 5090 setup at £358/month provides the parallel processing power needed for 5,000 hours/month with 20-30% burst headroom. GigaGPU servers come pre-configured with CUDA, Docker, and inference frameworks for immediate production deployment.
Save £82K/Year on Enterprise Transcription
Replace per-hour API billing that scales to thousands monthly with a fixed £358/month for unlimited transcription throughput.
