An Otter.ai alternative for a few recordings a month
Otter.ai is built around meetings: it joins your calls and transcribes them live, and its plans are priced for people who do that every week. If what you actually have is a recorded interview, a lecture or a voice memo now and then, the limits that matter are different. Here is what Otter's own pricing page says about uploading files, and what pay-as-you-go transcription looks like instead.
What Otter's free plan allows for uploaded files
According to Otter's pricing page (read on 6 October 2026), the free Basic plan includes 300 transcription minutes a month, with a cap of 30 minutes per conversation, and 3 audio or video file imports in total, over the lifetime of the account. The paid Pro plan raises imports to 10 a month. Pro and Business are subscriptions, billed monthly or yearly, and the page lists no pay-per-file option.
So for live meetings the free plan goes a long way. For uploaded recordings, the fourth file is where a subscription starts.
Pay-as-you-go transcription instead
CaptionIt charges for the minutes you transcribe and nothing else. Minutes come in one-off packs of 200 or 600, they never expire, and there is nothing to cancel. One minute of audio uses one minute of credit, rounded up, and the page shows the cost of your file before you spend anything.
You can transcribe the first 30 seconds free, with no account, to see the quality on your own recording before buying anything. The free sample takes files up to 3 MB, so export a short clip of a long recording.
What you get back
A timed caption file from the speech, in the subtitle toolkit on the same page. Download it as SRT for a video editor, convert it to WebVTT for a web player, or take plain text if you only want the transcript. Files can be up to 120 minutes and 25 MB; for a long video, export the audio track only.
The audio is transcribed and dropped. Nothing is stored on our side, and nothing is used for anything else.
When Otter is the better choice
If you need a bot that joins Zoom or Teams calls, live notes while people talk, speaker-labelled meeting summaries or a shared workspace for a team, that is what Otter is built for, and CaptionIt does none of it. CaptionIt is for the other case: a file you already have, turned into words or subtitles, paid for once.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a free Otter.ai alternative for uploaded files?
CaptionIt transcribes the first 30 seconds of a file free, with no account (files up to 3 MB for the sample). A whole recording is paid from a one-off minutes pack that never expires; there is no subscription.
Is there pay-as-you-go transcription with no monthly plan?
Yes. Buy a pack of minutes once and use them whenever you have a recording. One minute of audio costs one minute of credit, rounded up.
How long can one recording be?
Up to 120 minutes and 25 MB per file. Export the audio only, or at a lower bitrate, if a video is too large.