Whisper vs Commercial Transcription: Quality, Cost, and Privacy

OpenAI's Whisper is free and open source. Professional transcription services charge per minute. The decision seems obvious until you dig into the details.

Whisper's accuracy rivals commercial services for clear audio. English transcription is excellent; other languages are good but not great. The model runs locally, meaning complete privacy—nothing leaves your machine. For sensitive content, this alone might justify any accuracy tradeoffs.

Commercial services win on edge cases. Heavy accents, multiple speakers, background noise, technical jargon—these are where paid services with human correction outperform. They also handle formatting, timestamps, and speaker identification more reliably.

The cost analysis depends on volume. Self-hosting Whisper requires GPU infrastructure, but at high volumes, the per-minute cost approaches zero. Low volumes favor API-based Whisper (cheap) or commercial services (more polished). There's no universal answer—your use case determines the right choice.