Pepys Review (2026)Pay-As-You-Go Audio Transcription
By Daan Haket · Researched and written with an AI assistant · who does what
Speaker labels use three times the credits.
- Best for Researchers with hours of interviews
From €11 · 10-hour pack · per one-time, 10 hours cost €11 · read 2026-11-13
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Is Pepys right for you?
Your pain“I have a pile of recorded interviews and every transcription service wants a monthly fee I will not use up.”
Does Pepys solve it?YesPricing page, read 13 Nov 2026: credits never expire, personal use has no subscription, and a first 60 minutes are free with no card.
Your planPay as you go, from 10 hours for €11; 20 hours for €17.6; billed in USD
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Your pain“I need transcripts for dozens of old episodes and uploading them one by one takes days.”
Does Pepys solve it?YesPricing page, read 13 Nov 2026: batch upload of up to 100 files at once and files up to 5 GB and 10 hours each come with any paid pack.
Your planPay as you go, €0.88 an hour from €17.6, or €0.75 an hour from €74.8
Try Pepys →
Your pain“Our call recordings come back as one block of text and I cannot tell who said what.”
Does Pepys solve it?PartlyPricing page, read 13 Nov 2026: speaker labels cost 3 credits per minute, so a labelled hour uses three hours of credit.
Your planPay as you go; budget three times the hourly rate for labelled audio
Try Pepys →
- you need live meeting capture with a bot in the call, you transcribe every day and prefer a flat monthly plan, or you want a tool we have tested on real recordings.
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Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 13 Nov 2026
Pepys has a free account and pay-as-you-go credits. The free account gives 60 minutes once, with no card, files up to 1 GB, transcription in 99 languages with timestamps, AI summary, chapters and chat, translation, exports to TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, VTT and JSON, and API access metered on your free minutes. Paid credits cost €1.1 an hour on purchases under €17.6, €0.88 an hour from €17.6 and €0.75 an hour from €74.8.
The smallest pack shown is 10 hours for €11 and the next 20 hours for €17.6. Any purchase gives you files up to 5 GB and 10 hours, unlimited Google Drive, OneDrive and Zoom imports, batch upload of up to 100 files, speaker labels at 3 credits per minute, word-level timestamp exports and removal of the Pepys mark. The page says credits never expire, personal use has no subscription and all sales are final.
Teams can add a flat monthly plan, but the page shows no price for it. We did not buy credits, so we do not know the tax added or how the team plan is priced. Plans change, so check the live price on their site before you buy.
What the pricing page doesn’t say
The team plan has no visible price. The page shows euros but bills in USD, and all sales are final. Pepys Dictate, the Mac dictation app, is a separate product.
What Pepys does
Audio and video transcription with timestamps in 99 languages, summaries and exports; pay per hour of audio with no subscription.
One pack gives you the pro features for good
The page says any purchase, even 10 hours for €11, keeps speaker labels, batch upload, the API and word-level exports available after the hours run out. That makes the smallest pack the real entry point to the paid tools. Speaker labels triple the credit use, so labelled interviews cost about three times the headline rate.
How to actually use Pepys
Create a free account, upload an audio or video file or paste a public link, and read the timestamped transcript in the editor. The free 60 minutes are enough to try one long interview. Connect Google Drive, OneDrive or Zoom if the recordings live there. We did not run our own recordings through Pepys, so we cannot say how accurate the transcripts are or how well speaker labels work.
Distilled from Pepys home page and pricing page, read on 13 November 2026. Pepys is an affiliate partner of ours through its own program (25% of purchases for 12 months). We have not used the product ourselves.
The natural comparison is Otter: Otter joins meetings live and bills monthly. Compare whether you want pay-per-hour uploads after the fact or a subscription with live capture.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Pepys cost?
Per the pricing page read on 13 November 2026, the first 60 minutes are free. Paid credits cost €1.1, €0.88 or €0.75 an hour depending on pack size, starting at 10 hours for €11, billed in USD.
Is there a subscription?
The page says personal use has no subscription and credits never expire. Teams can add a flat monthly plan, but no price is shown.
Do speaker labels cost extra?
Yes. They use 3 credits per minute, so a labelled hour uses three hours of credit.
Does it need a bot in my meeting?
No. You upload the recording afterward, and the home page says no bot joins the room.
What do we not know?
How accurate the transcripts are on real recordings, the team plan price and the tax added at checkout.
Is this a hands-on review of Pepys?
This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test. Where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- Read 2026-11-13 on pepys.co/pricing, amounts shown in euros and billed in USD.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
Bottom line
In one line: Timestamped transcripts in 99 languages; 60 free minutes, then from €11 for 10 hours.
Best for: researchers with hours of interviews.
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