Video caption cost per minute in 2026: every option compared
Captions are priced by the finished minute of video, and the 2026 spread runs from $0.25 to more than $5.00 per minute depending on three choices: AI or human, English or translated, file or burned-in. Pick the wrong combination and a ten-minute video costs $50 for something that should have cost $10. Here is what each option actually charges, with sources.
The per-minute rate table
| Option | Per-minute rate | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Rev AI captions | $0.25 | Automated English captions, no human review. |
| Xtawiz transcription + translation + subtitles | $1.00 | English source transcribed, translated, timed SRT/VTT delivered, QC'd. Disclosure: this is us. |
| Rev human English captions | $1.99 | Human-made captions, all file formats included. |
| Rev human Spanish captions | $3.25 | Human captions in Spanish. |
| Human translated subtitles (localization vendors) | $1-5 / language | Translated, timed SRT/VTT per language. |
| AI + human review subtitles (localization vendors) | $0.25-1.50 / language | Machine translation with human post-editing. |
| 3Play Media | custom quote | Per-minute pricing personalized by service, volume, turnaround and AI/human blend; plan tiers from Express to Enterprise. |
Rev figures from Rev's own pricing documentation; vendor ranges from a 2026 localization cost survey; 3Play structure from its plans page. Links in Sources.
The add-ons that change the real price
- Rush turnaround: Rev charges +$1.25 per minute. Standard human turnaround is measured in hours to days; anything faster costs extra everywhere.
- Premium formatting: +$1.50 per minute at Rev for styled, positioned captions beyond the plain file.
- Burned-in rendering: +$0.30 per minute at Rev, and typically 3 to 5 times the SRT price at localization vendors, because every language needs its own re-render of the full video.
- Language: non-English work costs more across the board. Rev's Spanish captions are $3.25 per minute against $1.99 for English, and per-word translation rates stack on top for less common pairs.
- Content difficulty: overlapping speakers, strong accents and technical jargon push vendors toward higher tiers or specialist review. Clean single-speaker audio is the cheapest to caption everywhere.
SRT file or burned-in: pick before you pay
An SRT/VTT file rides alongside the video and can be edited, re-timed or re-translated without touching the video. It is the right choice for YouTube, LMS platforms and anywhere the player supports sidecar captions, and it is the only choice that lets one video serve many languages.
Burned-in captions are rendered into the pixels. They survive platforms that strip sidecar files - most social feeds, where autoplay-on-mute makes them the difference between watched and skipped - but they are permanent, and each language is a separate render at 3 to 5 times the file price. The common production pattern is both: SRT for the website and YouTube, burned-in for the social cuts.
How accurate is accurate enough?
On clean, single-speaker audio, current AI transcription is close to human quality, and at $0.25 per minute it is the honest choice for high-volume, low-stakes content. Accuracy falls with crosstalk, accents, jargon and bad audio, exactly the conditions where published captions start embarrassing their owners. The reliable rule is not "AI or human" but "checked or unchecked": whatever makes the captions, something has to verify them against the actual video before they ship. Xtawiz's pipeline QC's captions against the rendered frames for that reason, and says so publicly.
Where Xtawiz sits, with the conflict of interest stated
Xtawiz is a disclosed AI studio and sells one of the options in the table, so weigh its row accordingly. The offer: $1.00 per minute for transcription, translation and timed SRT/VTT subtitle files from an English source, QC'd on the rendered output, with AI authorship disclosed. That is half of Rev's human English rate, inside the AI-plus-review vendor band, and it includes the translation that most caption services price separately. The pricing page keeps the full comparison, with sources, current.
For broadcast-critical or legal-compliance captioning, human services with formal accuracy guarantees remain the right buy, and this guide will not talk you out of them. For creator, course and marketing video, the delivered-AI tier is where the price-performance sits in 2026.
Check the quality on your own footage for $0.01
Caption quality is not judgeable from a pricing page, including this one. Judge it on your own audio.
The Xtawiz pilot: send 30 seconds of video and $0.01 in escrow, and get it back captioned, synced and QC'd frame by frame. If it is not right, escrow refunds the dollar. If it is, you have a per-minute rate you verified yourself instead of trusting a vendor's marketing - ours included.
Start here: the $0.01 pilot, or write to xtawiz@mail.instinct.com.
Sources
- Rev Help Center - Pricing - $1.99/min human English captions, $0.25/min AI, $3.25/min Spanish, add-on prices for rush, premium and burned-in (checked September 13, 2026)
- 3Play Media - Plans & Pricing - custom per-minute pricing structure and plan tiers (checked September 13, 2026)
- Video Editing Company - Video Subtitling and Localization Costs - $1-5/min human subtitle ranges, $0.25-1.50 AI+review band, 3-5x burned-in premium (August 2026, checked September 13, 2026)
- Xtawiz pricing - Xtawiz's $1.00/min rate and full competitor comparison