Gladia replaces its 10-hours-a-month free tier with a one-time 50 EUR credit and a prepaid wallet
Gladia moved self-serve billing to a prepaid credit wallet with auto top-up and swapped its recurring 10 free hours per month for a single non-resetting 50 EUR signup credit.
Starter offered 10 hours of transcription free every month on a pay-as-you-go account billed in arrears, at $0.61/hr async and $0.75/hr real-time (captured 2026-06-09).
Starter is funded from a prepaid credit wallet with manual or automatic top-ups and opens with 50 EUR in free credits - a one-time grant with no monthly reset, which Gladia puts at roughly 80+ hours of pre-recorded or 60+ hours of real-time transcription. Per-hour rates are unchanged: async $0.61/hr, real-time $0.75/hr on Starter; async as low as $0.20/hr and real-time as low as $0.25/hr on Growth; Enterprise custom.
Proof of change
Gladia's pricing pages, as we captured them on two dates.
Showing the whole page as captured — scroll either panel, or open it at full size.
- 1 page had no counterpart in the earlier capture and is not shown.
Both images are our own captures, taken on the dates shown. The pixels are unmodified — nothing is retouched, and where a region is highlighted the marker is drawn over the image, not into it. Open either capture to see it at full resolution.
The headline rates did not move, but the way a Gladia account is funded did. Self-serve customers now run on a prepaid credit wallet: you top up manually, or set an auto-top-up threshold that recharges the existing payment method when the balance drops below a level you choose. Gladia notifies on low balance, top-ups, and failed payments, and the threshold, the top-up amount, and the feature itself can be turned off from the Developer Console. The company pitches this as “full visibility, no end-of-month surprises.”
The free-tier change is the sharper edge of the same move. The recurring “10 hours free every month” allowance is gone from the pricing page, replaced by a 50 EUR signup credit that the FAQ describes as “a one-time grant with no monthly reset. That’s roughly 80+ hours of pre-recorded transcription or 60+ hours of real-time transcription at current rates. Once used, top up or upgrade to continue.” Low-volume hobby users who previously sat inside a perpetual free allowance now have a finite runway and then a payment step.
Plan structure and prices are otherwise stable. Starter still lists async at $0.61/hr and real-time at $0.75/hr with 30 real-time and 25 async concurrent requests; Growth is still commitment-gated at “as low as” $0.20/hr async and $0.25/hr real-time, footnoted as 67% less than Starter; Enterprise remains a custom annual plan with unlimited concurrency, zero data retention, custom hosting, and SLAs.
Self-serve billing moved from pay-as-you-go in arrears to a prepaid credit wallet with manual or automatic top-ups, a user-set low-balance threshold, and notifications on low balance, top-ups, and failed payments — all editable in the Developer Console. The recurring 10-free-hours-per-month allowance was withdrawn in favour of a one-time 50 EUR signup credit with no monthly reset (roughly 80+ hours pre-recorded or 60+ hours real-time). No rate moved: Starter stays $0.61/hr async and $0.75/hr real-time, Growth as low as $0.20/$0.25 per hour, Enterprise custom; concurrency stays 30 real-time / 25 async.