Hard facts side by side: free tiers, prices, limits, SDKs and privacy. Every value links to the official page it came from and is re-checked every week.
| For voice |  LiveKit Agents |  Deepgram |  AssemblyAI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes, Build plan at $0, no card Includes 1,000 agent session minutes and $2.50 in inference credits (about 50 minutes) a month. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Trial credits $200 in free credit on Pay As You Go, no credit card required. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Yes $50 in free credits at signup, no credit card required. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| Starting price |
Ship adds 5,000 session minutes and $5 inference credits; Scale starts at $500/mo.
Source, Nov 15, 2026| $0.0043 per minute Nova-3 pre-recorded, monolingual, Pay As You Go. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| $0.15 per hour Universal-2 pre-recorded speech-to-text (Universal-3.5 Pro: $0.21/hr). Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| Rate limit | 100 LLM requests/min (free) Build plan: 600,000 LLM tokens/min, 5 STT and 5 TTS connections, 5 concurrent agent sessions. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | 50 concurrent requests Pay As You Go, speech-to-text REST API (150 for streaming WSS). Source, Nov 15, 2026 | 5 concurrent transcriptions Free accounts, async; paid accounts get 200+. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
|---|
| Size limit | Not listed | 2 GB per file Maximum file size for pre-recorded audio. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | 5 GB / 10 hours per file Transcript endpoint; direct uploads via /v2/upload capped at 2.2 GB. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
|---|
| Storage | Not listed | Not listed | Transcripts kept ~30 days Async audio deleted within 24-48 hours; transcript deletion begins at 30 days. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
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| Official SDKs | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript LiveKit Agents framework ships for Python and Node.js. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript |
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| Open source | Yes livekit/agents and livekit/agents-js are Apache-2.0; LiveKit Cloud itself is a hosted service. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Not listed | Not listed |
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| Trains on your data | Not listed | Opt-out Requests join the Model Improvement Program unless mip_opt_out=true is set. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Opt-out Certain PII-redacted files used for training unless opted out, on a BAA, or using EU servers. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
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| EU hosting | Yes EU project data region, eu-central agent hosting, and EU-only LiveKit Inference models. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Yes EU endpoint api.eu.deepgram.com keeps processing in the EU. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Yes EU endpoint api.eu.assemblyai.com keeps data in the EU. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
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| Compliance | SOC 2GDPRHIPAA SOC 2 Type II audited; HIPAA BAAs on Scale and Enterprise; ISO 27001 in progress. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | SOC 2GDPRHIPAASource, Nov 15, 2026 | SOC 2ISO 27001GDPRHIPAA SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001; GDPR via EU servers; HIPAA BAA available. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
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