Guide
"Bring your own API key" sounds like it might get expensive. It is the main reason people hesitate, and the actual numbers are so small they are hard to believe until you see them written down.
Groq publishes per-hour pricing for Whisper. As of this writing:
| Model | Price per hour of audio | Word error rate |
|---|---|---|
whisper-large-v3-turbo | $0.04 | 12% |
whisper-large-v3 | $0.111 | 10.3% |
Note what the unit is. It is an hour of audio, not an hour of using your computer. You are only billed for the seconds you are actually holding the key and speaking. That distinction is where most people's intuition goes wrong: a heavy dictation day is nowhere near an hour of recorded audio.
Using the turbo model at $0.04 per hour, and 22 working days a month:
| How much you actually speak | Audio per month | Cost per month |
|---|---|---|
| 10 minutes a day (notes, commits) | ~3.7 hours | about $0.15 |
| 30 minutes a day (regular use) | ~11 hours | about $0.44 |
| 1 hour a day (heavy, all prose by voice) | ~22 hours | about $0.88 |
| 2 hours a day (more than almost anyone) | ~44 hours | about $1.76 |
An AI cleanup pass on the text adds a little more, and it is small: the text of a day's dictation is a few thousand tokens, which on a fast open model is fractions of a cent.
So the honest summary is that transcription for one heavy user costs somewhere around a dollar a month. Groq's free tier covers ordinary personal use outright, which means plenty of people never pay anything at all.
Sanity check this yourself rather than trusting the table. Dictate normally for one day, then look at your provider dashboard. The number is usually lower than the estimate, because you speak less than you think you do.
If the underlying cost is a dollar a month, a $12 or $15 monthly subscription is not covering inference. It is covering inference plus a margin plus the business around it, and that is a completely legitimate way to run a company. It is just worth knowing which one you are buying.
When a vendor holds the API key, three things follow. They pay the provider, so they need a recurring price to cover a recurring cost. Your audio has to route through their servers to use their key, which is a privacy consequence rather than a pricing one. And the bill continues for as long as you use the product, because that is the model.
Bring-your-own-key inverts all three. You pay the provider directly at wholesale, your audio goes straight there, and the tool can be sold once.
This is the part a sales page usually skips, so here it is plainly.
VoiceForge is $79 once. Against a hypothetical $15 a month subscription, you are ahead after about five months, and further ahead every month after that. Against $10 a month it is about eight.
That means if you are not sure you will still be dictating in a year, a subscription is genuinely the cheaper choice, and you should take it. One-time pricing wins for people who already know this is part of how they work. It is a worse deal for someone who is still deciding.
What you get either way is the same underlying models. Nobody has a secret better Whisper. The difference is who holds the key, where the audio goes, and whether the bill ever stops.
Go to console.groq.com, sign up, create an API key, paste it in. It takes about a minute and the free tier is enough to start. You can see exactly what you have spent in the same dashboard, which is a thing a subscription will never show you.
The 10 fixes, free. Cost is the easy part. Getting output you do not have to rewrite is the part worth learning.
No other email, ever.
Prices are Groq's published rates at the time of writing and can change. Check their docs for current numbers.
usevoiceforge.com