Podcast editor pricing compared: what each tool really costs

Bottom line: Audacity costs nothing: it is free and open source with no paid edition. For a recording studio with editing, Riverside starts at £24 a month billed yearly (£288 a year), as shown to a UK visitor. Descript starts at $16 a person a month billed annually. Adobe Podcast has a free plan, and its paid features now come with Adobe Firefly Pro, shown at $19.99 a month on Adobe Podcast's plans page and £19.99 a month including VAT on Adobe's UK Firefly page. Paraphrase (ours) is £13.99 a month for 120 hours of transcription. Of the two entry plans priced in pounds that state an hour allowance, that is the lower cost per hour, but Paraphrase only edits your recording by transcript, so it is cheap per hour because it does less. All prices were read on 17 October 2026, in the currency each page showed, and are not converted, so we do not compare prices across currencies.

Headline prices hide the number that decides your bill: what each plan meters. Some count hours of media, some hours of downloads, some AI credits, some hours per day, some nothing at all. This post puts the published prices side by side and then does the arithmetic.

The table

Every price checked on 17 October 2026 on the vendor's own pricing page, except Paraphrase's, which come from our own billing system on the same date. Prices change; check before you buy.

Cost per hour of audio, at each entry tier

Our arithmetic, from the figures above, rounded to the nearest penny or cent. Currencies differ and are not converted, so compare within a currency, not across.

Riverside's rows divide by download hours, not recording or editing hours, which Riverside says are unlimited, so treat them as the price of separate tracks rather than of editing.

The "hours" are not the same thing, which matters more than the decimals:

• Paraphrase counts seconds transcribed. Editing, AI cleanup and export use no credits, so re-editing is free. AI cleanup has its own daily limit instead: 3 runs a day on the free plan and 30 on Premium.
• Descript media hours count "uploaded media files and media recorded in Descript, regardless of whether they're transcribed", and AI features such as Studio Sound and Remove filler words draw on separate AI credits, up to 30 credits per file each time you apply them.
• Riverside has no editing hours to divide by. Its help centre says recording, editing and exports are unlimited "(just not the separate tracks!)"; its paid plans' hour limit is on downloading separate per-speaker tracks, which is what the rows above divide by.
• Adobe Podcast meters per day, not per month: Firefly Pro allows Enhance Speech on up to 4 hours a day, with files up to 2 hours long, and Studio projects up to 2 hours with no download limit. A daily cap is a ceiling, not an allowance you pay for, so we have not turned it into a cost per hour. The plan's 4,000 generative credits a month are for Firefly's generative tools.

For scale: a weekly one-hour show is four or five hours of finished audio a month, and raw recordings may run longer. Every entry plan with an hour allowance covers four or five hours, so for a show like that the monthly fee, not the per-hour rate, is what you actually pay.

Each tool's pricing in brief

Audacity

Free, open source under GPL v3, and its site says it "will always remain free for everyone". Money only comes in for optional extras: paid cloud storage on audio.com, and the free and paid plugins on MuseHub. Full breakdown: Audacity pricing.

Paraphrase

Ours, so weigh accordingly. Premium is £13.99 a month, £83.85 a year (about £6.99 a month) or £179.65 for three years (about £4.99 a month), with 120 hours of transcription a month that does not roll over, 30 AI cleanups a day and projects up to 4 hours. Credit packs that never expire while your account is open cost £3.99 for 4 hours, £12.99 for 13 hours 20 minutes and £34.99 for 40 hours. A new account on the free plan gets 15 minutes of transcription, three cleanups a day, and projects up to 5 minutes. A 7-day Premium trial (monthly or annual billing) needs a card. If a recording fails for a reason on our side, its credits are returned automatically; a file that cannot be read at all is not refunded. Details on our pricing page and in credits and plans.

Descript

Hobbyist, Creator and Business are $16, $24 and $50 a person a month billed annually, or $24, $35 and $65 billed monthly, with 10, 30 and 40 media hours. Unused hours and AI credits "don't roll over". See Descript pricing.

Riverside

As shown to a UK visitor: Pro £35, Grow £45 and Webinar £99 a month, or £24, £34 and £79 a month billed yearly (£288, £408 and £948 a year); Business is "Contact Sales". Separate-track downloads are 15, 20 and 25 hours a month. A 14-day trial needs a card. Riverside says it adjusts pricing by region. See Riverside pricing.

Adobe Podcast

Adobe stopped selling standalone Adobe Podcast Premium to new customers on 30 August 2026. Its plans page now offers "the Adobe Firefly Pro plan with access to Adobe Podcast Premium" at $19.99 a month. Adobe's UK Firefly plans page shows Firefly Pro at £19.99 a month including VAT, with 4,000 generative credits a month that do not roll over. Adobe offers a free trial. The free plan keeps Enhance Speech (up to an hour a day, files up to 30 minutes) and Studio (two project downloads a day, up to 30 minutes each). Firefly Pro also includes Firefly's Generate Speech. See Adobe Podcast pricing.

Why trust these figures

Every competitor price was read on the vendor's own pricing page and help centre on 17 October 2026, not taken from a comparison site. Riverside's and Adobe Podcast's pages were rendered in a browser so that their prices loaded, and Riverside's prices are the ones it showed to us in the UK.

Paraphrase is ours. Of the plans priced in pounds, it has the lower cost per hour of transcription because it does one job: no recording studio, no noise removal, no video suite, no generated speech. Where it leads is that editing and re-editing never cost anything once a recording is transcribed. We have no customer reviews to cite.

So what should you pay?

• Nothing: Audacity, if you will cut by hand on a waveform.
• Recording remote guests: Riverside, Descript or Adobe Podcast, whichever plan's limits fit.
• Rescuing noisy speech: Adobe Podcast's free Enhance Speech, or Firefly Pro for more a day.
• One suite for audio and video: Descript.
• Editing your own voice by transcript, often and repeatedly: Paraphrase.

For what each tool is best at rather than what it costs, see the best podcast editing software in 2026. To try Paraphrase on your own recording, make a free account, no card needed: a new account gets 15 minutes of transcription.