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 and dated as such. To skip to your own figure, the free Descript cost calculator takes the hours you record, how much AI you use and the quality you export at, and names the plan that covers it.
What each plan costs
From Descript's pricing page, checked 14 August 2026 and again on 5 October 2026, when nothing in the table had changed. 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. Caption translation and dubbing are included on every paid plan and limited on Free; proofreading a translation is listed for Business 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 - on Creator and Business only. The pricing page lists them as not included on Free and Hobbyist, where running out means upgrading.
- 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. Hobbyist has no top-ups, so a month that outruns its ten hours means upgrading; on Creator it means a top-up. The Descript cost calculator works the same sum for your own hours.
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.
Does Descript have a free trial?
Not one it advertises. Descript's pricing page, checked 5 October 2026, does not mention a trial of any paid plan. The way to try Descript is the free plan, which its own FAQ says needs no credit card - so the free plan's limits are the trial's limits too: 60 media minutes a month, 720p export and a watermark on everything you render.
Are there Descript discounts, promo codes or Black Friday deals?
Descript's pricing page, checked 5 October 2026, names two discounts. Annual billing is the first, which Descript describes as saving up to 35% over the monthly price. Special rates for students, educators and non-profits are the second, applied for through a form linked from the page's FAQ. The page lists no sale or seasonal offer. Descript's checkout does take promo codes, though: its help centre, checked the same day, says a code works once, one per purchase, only for a new account upgrading from Free, and that some codes expire. So a code from a coupon site can only help on a first upgrade, if it has not expired. Every real Descript discount, with how to claim it, is in our guide to Descript discounts.
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?
On Creator and Business, media minutes and AI credits can each be topped up for an additional charge; on Free and Hobbyist, which the pricing page lists without top-ups, the only way on is to 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. Descript sells monthly and annual subscriptions only, and its pricing page lists no lifetime or one-time purchase option on any tier - true when this post was written on 14 August 2026 and still true on 5 October 2026. If one payment is what you are after, Rooster sells a lifetime licence beside its subscriptions - one payment for a licence that never expires, with every future update included. Rooster is ours, and the next section says why we mention it.
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 sold as a subscription that starts with a free trial or as a lifetime licence bought with one payment; what runs where, including the short list of things that genuinely use the network, is written up on the how it works page.
For the two editors side by side - cost, speed, editing, AI tools and what only the cloud can do - see Rooster vs Descript. If Rooster is not the right fit, the best Descript alternatives ranks the rest by the job you need done.
If you have decided to move, our guide to switching from Descript covers what to export from Descript before you cancel, how to bring it into Rooster, and what does not carry over, and how to cancel Descript covers the cancellation itself, refunds and what happens to your projects.
The plan table, which plans carry top-ups and translation, and the answers on trials, discounts and lifetime deals were checked against Descript's pricing page and its promo-code help on 5 October 2026. The help-centre details on how media minutes and AI credits are consumed were checked on 14 August 2026 and reflect 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.