Is there a genuinely free podcast transcript generator?

Yes. This one gives you 30 minutes of transcription every month with no credit card, which covers a full episode of most shows.

What exactly is included in the free tier?

Thirty minutes of transcription per month, every export format, speaker labels and timestamps, and both Spotify and Apple Podcasts as sources. No watermark and no branding on the output.

Is the free transcript less accurate than a paid one?

No. Free and paid transcripts run through the same AI model, so accuracy is identical. What the paid plans add is allowance, the AI tools, and the API. Every plan exports all seven formats with timings and speaker labels: a transcript is written once, and an upgrade cannot go back and add them.

Do I need to install anything?

No. It runs entirely in the browser. Paste a URL and the transcription happens server-side.

What happens when I use up my 30 minutes?

Transcription pauses until the allowance resets the following month, or you can upgrade — creator is 5 hours, pro is 40 hours, studio is 90 hours and podmaxxing is 300 hours.

Do unused free minutes roll over to the next month?

No. Your balance is reset to 30 minutes at the start of each month whether you used the previous month’s or not: unused minutes do not accumulate.

Will you start charging me automatically?

No. The free tier takes no card, so there is nothing to charge and nothing to cancel.

Why is a single free episode capped at 30 minutes?

Because 30 minutes is the whole monthly allowance, so a longer episode could not be completed within it. Paid plans remove the per-episode cap entirely.

Is the free tier limited to short or low-quality audio?

No. Audio quality and bitrate are irrelevant to the tier: the only free-plan limits are 30 minutes a month, 30 minutes per episode, and a 10 MB cap on direct file uploads.

Can I use free transcripts commercially?

Yes. There are no licensing restrictions on what you produce, and no attribution is required. Copyright in the underlying audio remains with whoever owns it.

That 30 minutes a month is genuinely not much. The free tier is a real product rather than a trial, but a working podcaster will exhaust it in one episode.

A free transcript generator
that is actually free.

Thirty minutes of transcription every month, on the same AI model the paid plans run on. No credit card to enter, no watermark on the output, and no trial clock counting down in the corner.

Sources in

What free means here

A monthly allowance, not a demo

The limit is how many minutes of audio you can transcribe. It is not a crippled version of the transcript.

30 minutes every month
Enough for a full episode of most shows, and it resets: this is not a one-time trial credit.
The same AI model as paid
Free transcripts are not a degraded preview. Accuracy is identical; the allowance is what differs.
No watermark, no branding
The file is clean text. Nothing is stamped on it and nothing is held back to force an upgrade.
No credit card, ever
Nothing to cancel and no countdown. If you never upgrade, the free tier keeps working.

How it works

Three steps to your first free transcript

Paste an episode link
Any public Spotify or Apple Podcasts episode. You see the opening of the real transcript before you are asked for anything.
Create a free account
Email or Google, no card. Your minutes are spent against the length of the audio, not the number of attempts.
Download your transcript
Open it in the editor, fix any names, and export TXT, MD, SRT, VTT, JSON, DOCX or PDF, with speaker labels and timestamps.

Comparison

Free versus paid, in full

Every plan transcribes with the same model. What changes is the allowance and what you can export.

Feature	Free	Creator	Pro	Studio	Podmaxxing
Monthly minutes	30	300	2,400	5,400	18,000
Max episode length	30 min	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Price	$0	$14/mo	$39/mo	$79/mo	$459/mo
Credit card required	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Transcription accuracy	Same model	Same model	Same model	Same model	Same model
Spotify & Apple Podcasts	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Export formats	TXT · MD · SRT · VTT · JSON · DOCX · PDF	TXT · MD · SRT · VTT · JSON · DOCX · PDF	TXT · MD · SRT · VTT · JSON · DOCX · PDF	TXT · MD · SRT · VTT · JSON · DOCX · PDF	TXT · MD · SRT · VTT · JSON · DOCX · PDF
Speaker labels	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
AI show notes & chapters	—	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Watermark	None	None	None	None	None

The catch

Where free tiers usually go wrong

Most "free" transcription tools are one of three things: a one-time credit dressed up as a plan, a full transcript you can see but not export, or a file with a watermark stamped through it. All three are the same move, do the work, then hold the output hostage.

The limit here is the honest one: minutes of audio. Thirty a month, reset monthly, and within them you get a real transcript in a real file with nothing stamped on it. If you never upgrade, that keeps being true.

What the paid plans add is scale and what you can do with a transcript afterwards, a much larger allowance, no cap on how long one episode can be, the AI tools that turn an episode into show notes and drafts, and the API. The transcript itself is never the lever: all seven exports, the timings and the speaker labels are written into every transcript on every plan, because they are decided the moment it is made and no upgrade can go back and add them to one taken without.

While you are here

Discover PodcastsToText

The transcript is where it starts. Here is what the rest of the studio does with it.

Your episode opens in an editor.

Click a word and you hear it. Change a speaker name once and it changes everywhere. The whole episode is one page you can actually read, with the line playing highlighted as it goes.

Try the live demo

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Transcribed from the episode link · click any line to seek

Marios

Have you ever listened to a podcast and wish you could read what was being said?

Maybe to quote it, study it, or just to find that one line again without re-listening to the whole podcast.

Hey everyone, I'm Marios and I'm really excited to introduce you to my new project,

podcasttotext.com.

It's a web-based app that converts podcast episodes from Spotify and Apple Podcasts into clean, accurate text in just seconds.

Why did I build this up? You may ask.

I built it because I listened to a lot of podcasts.

And at the end of each episode, I was forgetting what was being said.

So I wanted a way to quickly take notes or revisit specific moments without rewinding,

without re-listening the whole podcast.

Uploading files or manually transcribing just wasn't practical.

So I decided to make something that's fast.

Chapters

The problem: hearing something and losing it