No account. No daily cap.Others give you three files a day and call it unlimited. Files up to 60 minutes here, as often as you like.
By ShinobiTools Team · Last updated: August 2026
Every "100% free" transcriber has a catch somewhere — three files a day, twenty minutes, an account, or a paywall on the export. We opened all eight and wrote down what they actually allow. Yes, ScribeGrab is ours; the limits below come straight off each tool's own page, so you can check every line.
Transcribe audio now →Checked on each tool's own pricing or product page on 6 August 2026. Free plans change often, so treat this as a snapshot with a date on it rather than gospel.
| Tool | Free ceiling | Account? | Languages | Export |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScribeGrab | 60 min / 1.5 GB per file, no daily cap | No | ~100 | TXT, SRT, VTT |
| Whisper Web | 200 MB / 20 min per file, unlimited files | No | 100+ | Text |
| TurboScribe | 3 files a day, 30 min each, 1 at a time | Yes | 134+ | Text |
| Audio Transcriber AI | 100 MB per file | Yes | 120+ | TXT, Word |
| TurnScribe | Links only, no file upload | Yes | 90+ | PDF, DOCX |
| Notta | 120 minutes a month | Yes | Not stated | PDF on paid |
| Otter.ai | 300 minutes a month, 30 min per conversation | Yes | English, French, Spanish | TXT on free |
| SynthronAI | None published | Yes | Not stated | Text |
| oTranscribe | No AI — you type it yourself | No | Any | TXT, Markdown |
There is no single winner here, because the tools solve different problems. Pick on the constraint that actually bites you:
We opened every tool's own pricing or product page on 6 August 2026 and copied the numbers it published there — no vendor emails, no press kits. Where a tool advertises "no limits" without naming a ceiling, the table says so rather than guessing a number.
For ScribeGrab we can be more precise, because it is ours: it runs the turbo build of our speech model on our own GPU in the Netherlands, with a measured 1.94% word-error rate on clean English speech — 98.1% of words right. That figure and its method are in our accuracy breakdown. We have not run the same word-error test on the other seven, so this page compares limits and features — not transcript quality.
Speech recognition costs GPU time, and most of these tools rent that time from a cloud API per minute of audio. A cap is how they keep a free tier from bankrupting them. Two ways around it show up in this list: run the model on the user's own device (Whisper Web), or own the hardware (us — the same GPUs that run our other tools, so an extra transcript costs electricity, not a per-minute bill).
That is also the honest reason our free tier can be wider, and why we would rather tell you that than pretend to be more generous than the rest.
Scanning paper, not transcribing audio? Our sister roundup, best free document scanner tools, compares six free options the same honest way.
Yes. Upload as many files as you like, any time; the ceiling is 60 minutes and 1.5 GB per file. There is no account and no watermark. Ads are what keep the GPU running.
Whisper Web, because it runs the model inside your browser and the audio never leaves your device. Ours is deleted right after processing and wiped within 45 minutes, but it does reach our server first — if that matters for your recording, run it locally.
It is our page and our tool is on it, which is why every limit here is one you can check on the other tool's own page in under a minute. Where another tool is the better choice — local processing, live meetings, link pasting — we say so.
Transcripts are text, so watermarks are a video problem, not a transcript one. It matters if you burn subtitles into a video: several free video editors stamp the export. ScribeGrab does not.
On clear speech, modern speech-recognition models sit around 2% word errors; accents, crosstalk and background noise push that up fast. See our accuracy breakdown for the measurement and its limits.
6 August 2026. Free plans move around, so if you find a limit that has changed, mail us at [email protected] and we will correct it.