Setup
Cost & usage
What this actually costs to run. Transcription dominates voice — everything else is rounding.
Where the money goes
Hosted ASR, batched scoring.
ASR is 60% of total cost. Email and chat skip it entirely, which is why they are roughly a third the price of a call to audit.
Hosted vs self-hosted ASR
The single biggest lever on margin — and the answer if data residency ever becomes a hard requirement.
| Hosted | Self-hosted | |
|---|---|---|
| ASR rate / hour | $0.54 | $0.06 |
| ASR cost, 60 days | $4.48 | $0.50 |
| Projected monthly | $3.73 | $1.74 |
| Annual difference | $23.87 saved |
Self-hosting Whisper also keeps audio inside infrastructure you control, which removes the awkward part of the PDPA conversation: with hosted ASR the raw recording leaves the country before redaction can run on it.
Model usage
The scorecard renders into a cached prefix and the transcript is the volatile suffix, so repeat audits against the same scorecard read from cache at roughly a tenth of the input price.