Transcription Rates and Cost Calculator Simplified: Easy as 1-2-3!

Preparing for a transcription budget may be one of the first things a project manager should prioritize during their initial planning phase. After all, determining the budget for the service will significantly influence how the project will unfold since this will affect the overall project

When project managers look for transcription companies, they may consider several criteria on which provider they should hire to do the transcription service to get a massive bang for their buck. These may include:

• Transcription Rates - Project managers look for transcription providers with competitive rates. 
• Speed/Turnaround - Some projects are time sensitive, so they may consider vendors with the fastest delivery at the lowest price point.
• Machine or AI/human-made - Project managers may prefer human-made transcripts rather than AI ones for better accuracy, regardless of whether human-made transcripts are pricier and may take more time to produce than machine-generated ones. 
• Quality of transcripts - Project managers may want to hire transcription providers that produce excellent transcription work backed by positive feedback from other companies.

Calculating Transcription Cost

When a project manager has decided which transcription company they will go with, the next step they usually do is to ask for a quote or an estimate from the vendor they hired. Typically, transcription companies would ask several questions about the project requiring their service. The information gathered from the questions is essential to the project estimate and may significantly influence the final cost. These are some key things that a transcription company usually asks a project manager that may affect the project’s overall cost:

• Accents - Some interviews may happen between individuals or groups with speakers having moderate to thick accents. Transcription speed and audio difficulty will be affected by such speakers and may require an additional upcharge.
• Audio Quality - Recordings with distorted audio, background noises, and fuzzy speeches will affect the audio’s quality and may be gauged as difficult to transcribe. Of course, depending on the protocol of the transcription company, this may also incur an additional charge which will affect the overall transcription cost.
• Number of speakers - Group interviews or focus groups may also affect the audio quality. Crosstalks between speakers may occasionally occur during the interview, hindering the transcriber from accurately transcribing their dialogues. This setting may also challenge the transcriber if the transcription requires proper speaker identification if one or more voices between participants sound alike.
• Additional requests - Some projects may also require special instructions such as adding timestamps, specific formatting, and, as mentioned above, speaker identification. These will incur additional charges since these are considered extra work for the transcriber.

How To Use Our Transcription Calculator

By using our transcription rates and cost calculator, planning for your transcription budget will be less complicated, and you may even know how much the overall cost may be. Naturally, you may still want to contact your transcription vendor to verify if the price you got was correct, but most likely, the figures they will provide will be the same as the ones you have obtained from the Transcription Calculator. 

First off, here are some key figures to know more about what you are being charged for.

Turnaround and Rates

Upcharges and Add-On Features

Additional charges may also apply for the following factors or if you have special requests required on the transcripts. These conditions may affect the overall transcription cost.

Transcription Rates and Cost Calculator: The Overview

Now with the rates and additional charges out of the way, let us give you an example to explain better how to use the Transcription Calculator. Say, you are preparing a budget for fifteen 60-minute one-on-one interviews, and your favored turnaround time is for 2-days. You also wanted the speakers identified and to have timestamps applied every minute. Now, let us narrow down the figures and pretend you will enter them into the Transcription Calculator.

• 15 recordings x 60 minutes = Total of 900 minutes
• 2-day turnaround = $1.49/min
• Know Who = +$0.50/min
• Timestamps = +$0.25/min
• Total per minute rate = $2.24/min

With these figures, we multiply the total recording length in minutes by the whole per-minute rate, and that should give us the total of:

• 900 minutes x $2.24/min = $2,016.00

If there are no reported issues from the 15 recordings, we can safely assume that the above estimation will be the final transcription cost. However, if there were any reported issues from the recording/s, those would change the overall value of the presented quotation. Therefore, we sometimes advise clients that the quote they or we may get from the Transcriptions Calculator is still subject to changes.

Utilize Our Transcription Rates and Cost Calculator Now!

So, with the Transcriptions Calculator, you can get a ballpark figure of how much the project will cost, making budget planning more manageable, efficient, and convenient. It takes the complex process away from organizing your transcription budget and will give you more time to work on other important things for your project.