Call transcription is a metered add-on, and the per-minute rate swings 2x across the vendors that publish it

Corrected 2026-09-08. Two things in this guide were wrong, and one of them had been wrong for months. WildJar’s figures came from wildjar.com/pricing-united-states, a page the vendor has abandoned — nothing on the site links to it, its footer still reads 2024, its testimonials are placeholder text, and its sitemap entry is three months behind the live page — yet it still answers with HTTP 200 and the old rate card, which is exactly why re-verification kept confirming prices WildJar no longer charges. On the live page the transcription meter is still $0.04/min, but it belongs to the $89/mo Growth/Agency plan; the $39 Starter it used to sit beside is gone, replaced by a $150/mo Starter that bundles transcription instead of metering it, and the $159 Mammoth tier is no longer priced at all. Second, CallTrackingMetrics’ 3,000 transcribed minutes are not a monthly allowance — CTM’s page states they are counted per sub-account and do not renew — so they are priced below as a one-off. The 2026-09-08 CallRail read stands: four month-to-month tiers at $55 / $105 / $165 / $215 against $50 / $95 / $150 / $195 billed annually, with $0.05 per analysis minute at the entry allotment.

The short answer: on most call-tracking platforms, transcription is not part of your subscription at all. It’s a separate metered line that runs $0.02 to $0.04 per minute on top of whatever base you’re paying — a spread of 2x for what is nominally the same feature. Two plans break that pattern, and neither breaks it the way the marketing suggests. WildJar’s $150/mo Starter tier folds AI transcription into the base, alongside 4 tracking numbers and 500 minutes of call volume. CallTrackingMetrics’ Marketing Pro, $179/mo month-to-month, carries 3,000 transcribed minutes — but they are counted per sub-account and, on CTM’s own page, do not renew each month.

That framing matters because transcription cost scales with talk time, not with your plan tier. A practice fielding 1,000 minutes of calls a month pays for 1,000 minutes of transcription regardless of whether it sits on a $29 plan or a $297 one — and the per-minute rate is where vendors quietly diverge.

What the meter costs, vendor by vendor

These are the published transcription (or conversation-intelligence) per-minute rates in our dataset, with the monthly base they sit on top of:

Vendor	Plan (base)	Transcription rate	Cost of 1,000 transcribed min
CallTrackingMetrics	Marketing Lite ($79 month-to-month)	$0.02/min live transcription	$20
Dialics	Pay As You Go ($0 base)	$0.02/min	$20
Convirza	Starter ($29, no annual rate published)	from $0.02/min (analytics add-on)	from $20
Ringba	Professional ($297 month-to-month)	$0.035/min	$35
Ringba	Business ($147 month-to-month)	$0.04/min	$40
WildJar	Growth/Agency ($89, monthly only)	$0.04/min AI transcription	$40

The arithmetic is deliberately simple — base plus (minutes × rate) — but it’s the only honest way to compare, because none of these figures appears next to the headline plan price on a vendor’s pricing page. At a realistic 1,000 transcribed minutes a month, the cheapest meter (CallTrackingMetrics and Dialics at $0.02/min) costs $20, while the most expensive (Ringba Business and WildJar’s Growth/Agency plan at $0.04/min) costs $40. Same workload, double the add-on.

WildJar’s $150/mo Starter tier is missing from that table on purpose. It includes AI transcription rather than metering it, and WildJar publishes no per-minute transcription rate for it — no rate for the 500 bundled call minutes either, and nothing at all about what happens once those minutes are used. There is no figure to put in the last two columns, so we put none.

The bundles that change the math

Take WildJar first, because its shape changed more than its numbers. Starter is $150/mo and includes WildJar AI transcription outright, with 4 tracking numbers and 500 minutes of call volume. That makes it the only recurring transcription inclusion in this dataset — and it also ends WildJar’s run as this category’s cheap entry point, because Starter is now dearer than the plan above it. $150 against Growth/Agency’s $89: the entry tier buys an allowance, the tier above it buys a platform. Neither has an annual rate, because WildJar sells monthly subscriptions only.

Inside the shape Starter bundles, the two tiers do compare directly. Buy the same thing on the $89 meter — 4 local numbers at $8.50, 500 call minutes at $0.10, all 500 transcribed at $0.04 — and you pay $193/mo ($89 + $34 + $50 + $20) against Starter’s flat $150. Run a single tracking number instead and Growth/Agency stays cheaper up to 375 transcribed minutes ($97.50 + 375 × $0.14 = $150.00); run the four numbers Starter bundles and it stays cheaper only to about 193 ($123 + 193 × $0.14 ≈ $150). Past that, at the volume Starter is built for, the dearer sticker is the cheaper bill. What none of this tells you is the cost of minute 501, because WildJar does not publish it.

CallTrackingMetrics’ Marketing Pro, $179/mo month-to-month (~$149/mo billed annually), carries 3,000 transcribed minutes — the most-quoted bundle in this category, and not a monthly allowance. CTM’s page states they are counted per sub-account and that they do not renew each month. At CTM’s own $0.02/min the block is worth $60 once, not $60 a month; from month two you meter from the first minute like anyone else. Against the field that is still real money — 3,000 minutes at Ringba Business’s $0.04/min would be $120 — but budget it as a one-off credit. Marketing Pro is also where CTM’s sub-accounts start, 25 of them, which is what the per-sub-account wording is counting; the $79 Marketing Lite tier below it gets none.

Ringba is the cleanest illustration of how rate tracks with tier. Moving from Business ($147/mo month-to-month, $127 billed annually) to Professional ($297/mo month-to-month, $197 billed annually) drops transcription from $0.04 to $0.035 per minute — alongside recording ($0.01 to $0.005/min) and local minutes ($0.055 to $0.05/min). Each of those three lines falls by exactly half a cent, which makes the payback arithmetic unusually clean. On transcription alone, the $150/mo gap between the two plans takes 30,000 transcribed minutes to recover ($150 ÷ $0.005). Record and transcribe every local minute, so all three discounts land on the same minute, and it falls to 10,000 minutes ($150 ÷ $0.015). Commit annually and the gap narrows to $70/mo, and the threshold with it — about 4,700 minutes on all three lines. The higher subscription is a volume purchase, not a better deal in itself.

What’s missing is as important as what’s listed

Note which vendors aren’t in the table. CallRail, the category’s most-integrated platform, sells conversation intelligence as plan tiers — Lead Conversion at $165/mo month-to-month ($150 billed annually) and Lead Conversion Complete at $215/mo ($195 billed annually) carry its AI summaries and sentiment — rather than as a transcription rate you can meter against the field.

It does publish metered usage, though, and the rate is worth naming. At the entry allotment all four of its plans share — 5 local numbers and 250 local minutes — CallRail lists $0.05 per analysis minute, alongside $0.06/local-min, $0.08/toll-free-min, $0.03/SMS and $0.02 per form submission. That analysis meter is not a like-for-like transcription rate: it prices conversation analysis on top of a tier you have already bought, rather than standing in for the tier the way Ringba’s or Dialics’ meter does. So it stays out of the table — but it is published, first-hand, and it sits above every transcription rate in it. (We break down CallRail’s conversation-intelligence tiers and the BAA caveat separately.)

Convirza quotes its analytics add-on as “from $0.02/min,” with the underlying range stated as $0.005–$0.03/min, meaning the figure you actually pay depends on which scoring features you switch on — and every Convirza tier sells through a “Get A Demo” button rather than a sign-up, so that rate card is a list price rather than a checkout. Several enterprise names — Invoca, Marchex, Phonexa — publish no transcription rate at all because they publish no pricing at all, and WildJar’s own Mammoth tier has joined them: every card for it reads “Talk to the pack”, and every comparison cell reads Custom.

How to read this

If transcription is the feature you’re buying call tracking for, the per-minute rate deserves the same scrutiny as the base price, because it can move your bill by 2x at the same talk-time. The floor is $0.02/min (CallTrackingMetrics, Dialics, and Convirza at its published starting point); the ceiling among vendors that publish a transcription rate is $0.04/min (Ringba Business, WildJar Growth/Agency) — and CallRail’s $0.05/min analysis minute sits above all of them, though it meters conversation analysis on top of a tier rather than transcription on its own. Above a few thousand minutes the unit rate stops being the whole question, but neither bundle here is quite the answer it looks like. CTM’s 3,000 minutes on the $179/mo Marketing Pro plan are per sub-account and do not renew, so budget them as a $60 one-off. WildJar’s $150/mo Starter is the only tier that includes transcription every month — a real inclusion, but one that arrives with 500 call minutes and no published word on the cost of the minute after them. As always, we publish the rate, the base it sits on, and the source behind every figure, so you can re-run the math against your own minutes.