Aqua Voice pricing: what it actually costs in 2026
Aqua Voice Starter is free for 1,000 words once. Pro is $8 a month on annual billing or $10 month-to-month, Max is $24 annually or $30 monthly, and Team is $12 per user per month for two to nine people. Students get 70% off Pro and Max.
Aqua Voice Max is $288 a year on annual billing, which is the price of Realtime Mode and the "Send it" command. (aquavoice.com/pricing, checked September 4, 2026)
Competitor pricing and features last verified September 4, 2026. Every claim links to its source.
| Plan | Price | Billing | What it covers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Startersource | $0 | free | 1,000 free words, no card required |
| Pro (annual)source | $8 | annual | per user, billed annually at $96 |
| Pro (monthly)source | $10 | monthly | per user |
| Max (annual)source | $24 | annual | per user, billed annually at $288 |
| Max (monthly)source | $30 | monthly | per user |
| Teamsource | $12 | monthly | per user, 2-9 people |
Choose Aqua Voice if…
- Pro at $8 a month on annual billing is the cheapest paid tier among the cloud-first apps compared here.
- The 70% student discount brings Pro to $2.40 a month, which no VoiceGem price matches because VoiceGem has no student rate.
- Aqua Voice runs Avalon, its own transcription model, and sells it as an API — a level of control over accuracy that VoiceGem, which ships third-party models, does not have.
Why Aqua Voice's tiers escalate and VoiceGem's do not
Aqua Voice's Max tier exists because realtime inference costs more to serve than batch inference. Charging three times the Pro price for Realtime Mode is a direct reflection of that, not an upsell invented to fill a pricing table.
VoiceGem has no tier ladder at all: $25, $39, $49 and $159 buy the same software for one, two, three or ten Macs. Streaming transcription, every local model and the Deterministic Pass are in all of them, because none of it costs anything per minute to serve.
The trade is real in both directions. Aqua Voice buys a model it controls end to end; VoiceGem buys a price that does not scale with how much you talk.
What leaving Aqua Voice costs
Aqua Voice's expanded custom dictionary is a paid feature with no documented export, so a long project vocabulary is copied out by hand before the subscription ends. That is the migration.
VoiceGem's dictionary and word replacements live on the Mac and export with its settings, so the list survives any future move. Nothing else transfers in either direction, and neither vendor claims it does.
What each Aqua Voice tier costs
Starter is free and includes 1,000 words on the Avalon model with no credit card required. Pro is $8 a month billed annually at $96, or $10 month-to-month, and adds unlimited words, custom instructions and an expanded custom dictionary. Max is $24 a month billed annually at $288, or $30 month-to-month, and adds Realtime Mode and the "Send it" voice command.
Team is $12 per user per month for two to nine people with centralized billing, and Business is custom for ten or more. A single-Mac VoiceGem licence at $25 sits below four months of Pro.
How far 1,000 free Aqua Voice words actually go
1,000 words is roughly two pages of dictation, once, and the allowance does not refill. It is enough to confirm the app installs and recognises your voice, and not enough to learn whether it fits your week.
The free tiers worth comparing it against are Typeless at 8,000 words a week, Wispr Flow at 2,000 desktop words a week, Willow Voice unlimited on a smaller model, and VoiceGem at 15 minutes of recorded audio a day with no feature withheld.
Who the Aqua Voice student discount actually helps
70% off brings Pro to $2.40 a month on annual billing and Max to $7.20 a month. Over a three-year degree that is $86.40 for Pro, which undercuts every one-time licence in this comparison except VoiceGem's cheapest.
VoiceGem has no student pricing at all. For an eligible student comparing total cost, Aqua Voice Pro at $2.40 a month is a genuinely competitive number and this page is not going to bury it.
What people ask before switching
“Accuracy on library names and technical vocabulary is always terrible.”
Library and symbol names are exactly where a generic speech model fails, and VoiceGem does not pretend otherwise. The personal dictionary and word replacement exist for that reason, and they are per project rather than global.
How the personal dictionary works →“My employer's code cannot go to a third-party server, so cloud dictation is out.”
VoiceGem's default engine runs on the Mac and the Deterministic Pass never leaves it. Cloud AI providers are opt-in and use your own key, held in the macOS Keychain. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you switch it on and supply the key yourself.
Which models run locally →“When the connection is poor it stalls, spirals, or loses what I dictated.”
A hosted dictation service has a round trip to fail. VoiceGem's default engine runs on the Mac and the Deterministic Pass is a pure function, so there is no request to time out and no queue to spiral — dictation behaves the same on hotel wifi as at a desk.
Which models run on the device →Also comparing: Aqua Voice and VoiceGem, side by side, the Aqua Voice alternatives, ranked honestly, or the Aqua Voice migration, hour by hour.
Common questions
Pro is $8 a month on annual billing, which is $96 a year, or $10 month-to-month. Max is $24 a month annually, which is $288 a year, or $30 month-to-month. Team is $12 per user per month.
The Starter plan gives 1,000 free words on the Avalon model with no credit card required. The allowance does not refill, so evaluating it over more than a couple of sessions means paying.
Realtime Mode, the "Send it" voice command and early access to new features, for three times the Pro price. Everything else, including unlimited words and the custom dictionary, is already in Pro.
Yes, 70% off Pro and Max, which brings Pro to $2.40 a month on annual billing and Max to $7.20. VoiceGem offers no student pricing, so this is a real advantage for anyone eligible.
No. Every Aqua Voice tier is a subscription. The one-time options in this comparison are VoiceGem from $25, MacWhisper's App Store Pro Lifetime at $89.99, and Superwhisper at $249.99.
Five seats on the Team plan at $12 per user per month is $720 a year. VoiceGem's Startup licence covers ten Macs for $159 once, with no centralized billing or shared settings of any kind.
$25 once against $96 to $288 a year, with 15 free minutes of audio a day first.
VoiceGem is released under GPL-3.0, a derivative of VoiceInk by Prakash Joshi Pax.