Descript Pricing 2026: Media Hours and AI Credits Explained
Vorec Team · 2026-09-17 · 6 min read
Descript prices differently from most video tools, and the difference matters more than the headline figure. It meters media hours and AI credits separately, so the tier you need depends on your volume, not just your feature list.
Figures below come from Descript's own pricing page, verified 17 September 2026. Check the billing toggle yourself before purchasing — these move.
The Short Version
| Plan | Annual (per person/mo) | Monthly | Media hours/mo | AI credits/mo | Export |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 60 minutes | 100 one-time | 720p, watermarked |
| Hobbyist | $16 | $24 | 10 hours | 400 | 1080p, no watermark |
| Creator | $24 | $35 | 30 hours | 800 | 4K, no watermark |
| Business | $50 | $65 | 40 hours | 1,500 | 4K + team brand controls |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom | SSO, SCIM, audit logs, SOC 2 |
Seats: Hobbyist is 1. Creator supports up to 3 team members, Business up to 5 — billed separately, so a "3-person Creator plan" is three subscriptions, not one.
The Two Limits You Will Actually Hit
Media hours is processing time — how much footage you can run through Descript per month. Free gives 60 minutes. That is one long meeting, or a handful of short tutorials.
AI credits meter the AI tools: Underlord, translation, avatars, and similar. Free gives 100 credits once, not monthly. So the free tier lets you evaluate the AI features rather than use them ongoing.
Which limit binds first depends on your work. Long-form podcast editing burns media hours. Short clips with heavy AI cleanup burn credits. Check both against your actual volume, because upgrading for the wrong one is the common mistake here.
The Watermark Is the Free-to-Paid Trigger
Free exports at 720p with a watermark. That is fine for evaluating the editor and unusable for anything customer-facing.
Hobbyist removes the watermark and lifts export to 1080p. If you are publishing at all, that is the first real tier.
Creator is the 4K trigger, plus unlimited royalty-free stock media, full Underlord access with 20+ AI tools, and custom drive and page branding with white-label publish pages.
Business adds TEAM brand controls — Brand Studio across the team — plus translation with proofreading and native-sounding AI speakers.
One wrinkle worth spelling out, because the page says it two different ways. The summary cards highlight custom avatars and dubbing under Business. Descript's detailed feature comparison further down lists them more broadly:
| Free | Hobbyist | Creator | Business | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Create custom avatar via image upload | Limited | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Translate audio (dubbing) | Limited | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Translation proofread (captions and dubbing) | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
So image-upload avatars and basic dubbing are available from Hobbyist, with limited access even on Free. What Business actually adds is translation proofreading and native-sounding AI speakers, plus team-wide Brand Studio. The cards emphasise those features under Business without saying they are exclusive to it — worth checking the comparison table before upgrading for a capability you may already have.
Note also that avatars are distinct from AI Speech with custom voice clones, which the cards list on Hobbyist.
What Makes Descript Different
The core idea is genuinely distinct: you edit video by editing text. Delete a sentence from the transcript and it vanishes from the video. Filler-word removal across an hour of footage is one action.
That is superb for talk-led content — podcasts, explainers, commentary — where the spoken track is the spine.
It is a weaker fit for screen-led tutorials, where the screen carries the content and the voice annotates it. There, the problems are legibility and pacing — the button being 11 pixels tall, the cursor being invisible — and those are timeline problems rather than transcript problems.
Neither approach is better in the abstract. Ask whether your voice or your screen is doing the teaching.
How It Compares
| Entry paid | Metering model | |
|---|---|---|
| Descript | $16/person/mo annual | Media hours + AI credits |
| Loom | $15/user/mo annual | Per seat, recording-length caps |
| Camtasia | $179.88/yr Essentials | Annual subscription |
| Vorec | $9/mo | Credits per analysis and per narration segment |
Sources: Loom, Camtasia. Different models, so compare against your own monthly volume rather than the sticker price.
Where Vorec Fits
Descript generates narration too — its pricing lists AI Speech and text-to-speech, scripts, stock AI voices and voice clones. So this is not a case of one tool having narration and the other not.
The difference is where each is strongest. Descript's signature capability is transcript-based editing of speech that exists, whether you recorded it or generated it. Vorec's is different. Record your screen in silence, no microphone, and the AI detects each click, writes narration matched to what is happening on screen, and generates the voiceover. Freeze-sync holds the frame when an explanation needs more room than the recording allows, so narration never runs ahead of the action. The same recording also produces a written step-by-step article, and narration regenerates in another language without re-recording.
Plans start at $9/month with a free trial of 200 credits; trial exports carry a watermark. There is no transcript-first editing model and no podcast tooling — Descript is better at those, and this is not trying to replace it.
Bottom Line
Price Descript against your monthly volume, not its feature list. Sixty free minutes evaluates the editor; publishing anything means Hobbyist for the watermark, Creator for 4K and white-label publish pages, Business for team Brand Studio and proofread translation.
And be clear which meter binds for you. Media hours and AI credits run out independently, and the plan that fixes one may not fix the other.
Related: our Descript alternative guide and Camtasia vs Descript.
No narration to transcribe yet? Upload one silent screen recording to Vorec and get a narrated tutorial plus a written guide. Start free with 200 credits.