Descript pricing in 2026 - plans, media minutes, AI credits
Descript costs between $16 and $65 per person per month, across four paid plans that differ mainly in their meters: how many media minutes you can record or upload each month, how many AI credits you can spend, and what export quality you get. The free plan allows 60 minutes a month and puts a watermark on every export.
That is the short answer. The longer answer is that Descript's price is only partly the subscription number, because the plans are built around two usage meters that most pricing pages skim past. This post lays out both, with every figure taken from Descript's own published pages on 14 August 2026 and dated as such.
What each plan costs
From Descript's pricing page, checked 14 August 2026. The per-month figures in the annual column are what you pay when billed for a year up front.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Media per month | AI credits | Export | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 60 minutes | 100, once | 720p, watermark | 5 GB |
| Hobbyist | $24 | $16 | 600 min (10 h) | 400/month | 1080p | 100 GB |
| Creator | $35 | $24 | 1,800 min (30 h) | 800/month | 4K | 1 TB |
| Business | $65 | $50 | 2,400 min (40 h) | 1,500/month | 4K | 2 TB |
An Enterprise tier sits above these with custom pricing, custom meters, SSO and dedicated support. Translation and dubbing are listed as Business and Enterprise features only. There is no lifetime purchase option; every plan is a monthly or annual subscription.
The two meters
The subscription buys an allowance, and two separate meters draw it down.
Media minutes are consumed when you record or upload - video, audio, screen recordings, imported files. Per Descript's help centre, a one-hour session uses 60 minutes regardless of participant count, and still images count as one second each. The meter measures what enters the project, not what you export: re-records, alternate takes and B-roll you end up cutting all draw from the same monthly pool.
AI credits are consumed by the AI features - Descript's help centre names Studio Sound, filler-word removal and avatar generation among them, and notes that messages to its Underlord assistant also spend credits. We saw this first-hand: benchmarking Descript 2.20.0 on the record-edit-export workflow on 13 August 2026, the filler-word removal panel warned "uses AI credits" before it would search a 58-second clip. Descript's documentation is also plain that some AI actions have no fixed price - the cost depends on what the AI ends up doing - and that unused credits do not roll over month to month.
The costs that are easy to miss
- The free plan watermarks every export and caps resolution at 720p, so it is a trial rather than a working tier.
- Credits expire monthly. A quiet month does not bank anything for a busy one.
- Some AI costs are not predictable. Descript's own documentation describes certain AI features as varying in cost with the job, so the same edit can spend a different number of credits on different runs.
- Running out mid-project means paying again. Top-ups exist for both meters, priced separately from the subscription.
- The meters count the raw material, not the result. An hour of interview footage cut down to a ten-minute video still consumed an hour of media minutes.
Why older articles show different prices
Descript restructured its plans around September 2025 - the change was covered at the time by Trebble and others - and articles written before then describe plan names and prices that no longer exist. If a comparison page disagrees with the table above, check its date, then check Descript's pricing page, which is the only source this post treats as authoritative.
What a working month looks like
A weekly podcaster recording one hour per episode consumes four to five hours of media minutes a month before any retakes, imported clips or B-roll - within Hobbyist's ten hours, but close enough that a second camera angle or a scrapped session pushes toward Creator. At annual billing that is $192 a year on Hobbyist or $288 on Creator, plus top-ups in any month the meter runs out before the work does.
Frequently asked questions
Is Descript free?
There is a free plan, and it is genuinely useful for evaluating the editor. As a working tier it is constrained by design: 60 media minutes a month, 720p export, a watermark on everything you render, and a one-time grant of 100 AI credits rather than a monthly allowance.
What uses AI credits in Descript?
The AI features: filler-word removal, Studio Sound, avatar generation and Underlord chat are the ones Descript's documentation names. Costs scale with the job, and for some features the cost is not fixed in advance. Transcription itself draws the media-minutes meter instead, at upload or record time.
What happens when the meters run out?
Media minutes and AI credits can each be topped up for an additional charge, or you can upgrade to the next plan. Unused AI credits do not roll over, so a top-up bought late in the month does not carry its remainder into the next one.
Does Descript have a lifetime deal?
No. As of 14 August 2026 Descript sells monthly and annual subscriptions only, and the pricing page lists no lifetime or one-time purchase option on any tier.
Where Rooster sits
We are building Rooster, a Mac video editor with Descript's record-transcribe-edit-export loop as its reference workflow, so we watch this pricing model closely and we should declare that interest.
Rooster's answer to the meters is architectural rather than commercial: transcription and effects run on your own Mac, so there is no media-minutes meter to draw down and no per-action AI credit - the machine you already own does the work. Its transcription engine already runs locally at no cost per minute. Rooster is in active development and not yet released; what runs where, including the short list of things that genuinely use the network, is written up on the how it works page.
Every price and limit above was checked against Descript's published pages on 14 August 2026 and reflects that date. Descript can change its pricing at any time; if you spot a figure this page has not caught up with, tell us and we will correct it.