Deepgram $200 Free Credit: No Card Required (2026)

Deepgram gives every new account $200 in free credit on its Pay As You Go plan, and you don't need a credit card to get it. Deepgram says that is roughly 43,000 minutes (over 700 hours) of transcription with its Nova model. The credit is not limited to speech-to-text: it also covers text-to-speech, the Voice Agent API and audio intelligence. The one point to watch is expiry. The pricing page says the credit lasts until you use it, but Deepgram's developer documentation says free promotional credits expire one year from signup.

What the $200 covers

The Pay As You Go plan includes all endpoints in Deepgram's public models, and the free credit is spent at the same Pay As You Go rates as paid usage. These are the main rates on Deepgram's pricing page in October 2026:

The right-hand column is our arithmetic: $200 divided by the hourly or per-character rate. For example, $200 ÷ $0.26 per hour = 769 hours of Nova-3 pre-recorded audio, and $200 ÷ $0.030 per 1,000 characters = 6.67 million characters of Aura-2 speech. Add-ons reduce these numbers.

Add-ons and audio intelligence

Speech-to-text features are priced on top of the base rate. On pre-recorded audio, Deepgram lists redaction at $0.0020/min and keyterm prompting at $0.0013/min on Pay As You Go, while speaker diarization is included; other add-ons such as entity detection have their own per-minute rates in the same table. Audio intelligence features (summarization, topic detection, sentiment analysis and intent recognition) are billed per token: $0.0003 per 1,000 input tokens and $0.0006 per 1,000 output tokens on Pay As You Go.

Billing details that stretch the credit

• Per-second billing. Deepgram's FAQ says a 14-second file is billed as 14 seconds, not rounded up to 15 seconds or a minute.
• Multichannel counts per channel. A 10-minute stereo file processed as two channels is billed as 20 minutes.
• Text-to-speech is billed per 1,000 characters of input text for Flux TTS, Aura-2 and Aura-1.
• Voice Agent API is billed per minute of WebSocket connection time, so idle connections still cost money.

Does the credit expire?

This is the one area where Deepgram's own pages disagree, so we show both:

• Pricing page: the Pay As You Go plan is described as "No minimums. No expiration." The FAQ says that unlike free tiers that expire after 12 months, the $200 credit is available until you use it up.
• Developer documentation: the Managing Projects guide says Deepgram free promotional credits expire one year from signup, while credits bought by individuals with a credit card do not expire, and enterprise-contract credits expire at the end of the contract.

Until Deepgram aligns these pages, plan as if the $200 expires 12 months after signup. Your console's billing view shows the balance on your project; if an expiry date is shown there, that is the one that applies to your account.

Who qualifies

Deepgram's pricing page says every new account receives the $200 credit. It does not publish any other eligibility rules, such as country restrictions, business verification or student status. No credit card is required. The credit is a sign-up offer, so creating extra accounts to collect it again is not something Deepgram describes as allowed.

How to claim it, step by step

1. Go to console.deepgram.com/signup and create an account.
2. Deepgram structures accounts into projects. Your first project is created for you, and any promotional credit is attached to it.
3. In that project, create an API key. Deepgram recommends separate keys for testing and production.
4. Make a request to the speech-to-text, text-to-speech or Voice Agent API. Usage is deducted from the $200 balance automatically.
5. Check usage and remaining balance in the console as you test.

curl -X POST "https://api.deepgram.com/v1/listen?model=nova-3&smart_format=true" \
  -H "Authorization: Token $DEEPGRAM_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: audio/wav" \
  --data-binary @meeting.wav

Credit lives in the first project. If you create a second project for production, its usage won't draw on the $200 unless you ask Deepgram Support to transfer the balance. Deepgram's docs say any expiry date moves with transferred credit.

Limits on the free credit

The free credit uses Pay As You Go limits. These are the concurrency limits on the pricing page; Deepgram says requests over the limit may be queued or rejected.

Deepgram's docs also note that API keys work only inside the project they were created in, the account that created a key must stay in that project for the key to keep working, and programmatically generated API keys are limited to 250 per day.

Older models and the credit

Deepgram still serves its older speech-to-text models for existing deployments at unchanged rates: Nova-2 streaming at $0.35 per hour, Enhanced at $0.99 per hour and Base at $0.87 per hour, with Growth rates about 12.5% lower. The free credit is spent at whatever rate the model you call charges, so testing on Enhanced or Base uses the $200 roughly three to four times faster than Nova-3 pre-recorded at $0.26 per hour. Deepgram recommends that new projects start with its current models.

A sensible test plan for the $200

Because the credit spans several products, it is worth deciding up front what you want to learn. One way to split it for a voice product prototype:

1. Accuracy test (about $10): run 30 to 40 hours of your own recordings through Nova-3 pre-recorded and compare transcripts with a human reference.
2. Latency test (about $20): stream 50 or more hours through Nova-3 or Flux streaming to measure real-time behaviour on your network.
3. Voice output (about $20): generate around 650,000 characters with Aura-2 to compare voices.
4. Agent pilot (the rest): run end-to-end Voice Agent calls, which are the most expensive per minute at $0.075 on the Standard tier.

These amounts are illustrative arithmetic at the published rates, not Deepgram recommendations.

What happens after the $200

When the credit is used up you stay on Pay As You Go: no minimums, billed monthly on usage. To keep going you add a payment method in the console. For larger volumes, Deepgram offers:

• Growth: prepaid annual credits starting at $4,000 a year, with rates up to about 20% lower (for example Nova-3 pre-recorded at $0.0036/min instead of $0.0043), higher streaming concurrency and priority support. Overages are billed at the Growth rate plus a 10% premium, and a card must be on file.
• Enterprise: custom pricing, deployment options including on-premise or private cloud, and custom limits.

Worked cost examples after the credit

• A podcast app transcribing 300 hours a month of English audio with Nova-3 pre-recorded: 300 × $0.26 = $78 a month. The $200 credit covers the first two and a half months.
• A voice agent handling 2,000 five-minute calls a month on the Standard Voice Agent API: 10,000 minutes × $0.075 = $750 a month. The credit covers about 2,667 minutes, roughly the first eight days.
• Reading 1 million characters of text aloud a month with Aura-2: 1,000 × $0.030 = $30 a month, so the credit lasts more than six months.

Getting the most out of the credit

• Pick the model for the job. Nova-3 monolingual is the cheapest current speech-to-text option; use multilingual or Flux only where you need them.
• Use pre-recorded for batch work. It is cheaper per minute than streaming ($0.0043 vs $0.0048 for Nova-3 monolingual).
• Merge channels when you don't need them separate. Multichannel processing bills each channel.
• Close idle Voice Agent connections. Billing is on WebSocket time.
• Turn on only the add-ons you use. Redaction and keyterm prompting, for example, each add to the per-minute cost.

How it compares with other free speech APIs

For startups, Deepgram for Startups is a separate program offering up to $100,000 in credits to be used within 12 months. Deepgram says applicants should be early-stage startups in production or launching within six months, and that responses typically arrive within a week. The ElevenLabs equivalent is its startup grants program, and our guide to getting free AI credits covers other startup programs.

Common mistakes

• Assuming the credit never expires. Deepgram's documentation says promotional credits expire a year after signup, even though the pricing page says otherwise.
• Creating a new project and wondering why the balance isn't used. Credit is attached to the first project.
• Leaving streaming or agent sockets open. Streaming and Voice Agent usage is billed on connection time.
• Forgetting that stereo doubles the bill. Each processed channel is billed separately.