Phonotheca and Trint
A Trint alternative you can pay for yourself
Trint is bought by newsrooms, by the seat, on a yearly term. Phonotheca is $12 a month for one person, meters audio hours instead of seats, and takes a backlog as readily as this week’s interview.
Source · Delgado
When did you first see the second set of figures?
Two weeks before the board signed it off.
TimelineI raised it in writing and nothing came back.
Open the sample workspaceNo account needed.
What a year costs one person
Trint publishes a per-seat price with a lower rate on an annual commitment, and its unlimited plans exclude archival and bulk projects. Phonotheca charges one rate for one workspace and counts hours of audio, backlog included.
See what each plan includesTrint Pro
One seat, annual term, archival and bulk projects excluded
€828
Phonotheca Solo
20 audio hours a month, cancel any month
$144
Phonotheca Pro
50 audio hours a month, cancel any month
$348
Trint figure is its published single-seat annual rate, billed per seat. Prices shown as of August 2026, tax exclusive.
Which tool fits which job
Phonotheca fits when you have
- A budget of your own rather than a department's
- Interviews that accumulate into a body of work you search later
- Passages you need to quote with speaker, source, and timestamp
- Recordings that have to stay in the EU and out of model training
Trint fits when you have
- A newsroom or production team working in the same document
- Video that becomes a script, a rough cut, or an editor handoff
- Broadcast captions and subtitles as a regular deliverable
- Translation across a wide language list as part of the workflow
Both products change. Check each vendor’s site before you switch.
Three things that work differently here
Month to month
A plan starts and stops on your own dates. There is no annual term to give notice against and no seat count to negotiate, because a workspace belongs to one person.
The archive outlives the subscription
Stop paying and transcripts, tags, search, and export all keep working on the free plan. Take the whole project out as Markdown, CSV, or a REFI-QDA archive whenever you want.
Processed and stored in the EU
Audio and transcripts stay in European regions, the transcription service deletes its copy once the transcript lands, and nothing is used to train models.
Interviews you can still reach in five years
A recording from a story you filed two years ago is worth something the day a name comes back around. That only holds if the transcript is still searchable and the audio is still behind it.
Interviews live in projects, a speaker renamed once in a recording carries through every quote and export from it, and search runs over every transcript at once. The free plan keeps all of it open, so a lapsed subscription pauses new transcription and nothing else.
Ways out
- Markdown — tagged passages with speaker, interview, and timestamp, ready to paste into a draft.
- CSV — the same quotes as rows, for a spreadsheet or a sourcing log.
- REFI-QDA (.qdpx) — the whole project, transcripts as sources and tags as codes, for NVivo, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, Dedoose, or Quirkos.
One workspace, one price
Hours of audio are the limit on every plan.
Free
Enough to see a corpus take shape.
$0forever
3 audio hours, once
- Unlimited projects, interviews, and tags
- Full-text search across every transcript
- Markdown, CSV, and REFI-QDA export
Solo
A study's worth of interviews, every month.
$12per month
20 audio hours a month
- Hours reset on your renewal date
- Everything in Free, never gated
Pro
RecommendedFor a fieldwork season or a whole cohort.
$29per month
50 audio hours a month
- Hours reset on your renewal date
- Everything in Solo
Prices are in USD, tax added at checkout. Compare the plans
Questions before switching
- Is there a contract or a notice period?
- No. Solo and Pro are monthly and cancel in the billing portal, effective at the end of the period you already paid for. The free plan needs no card at all.
- How many files can I upload a month?
- As many as you record. Plans are metered in audio hours, so twelve fifteen-minute calls and three hour-long interviews are the same three hours either way.
- I have a backlog of recordings already. Does that count?
- It is hours like any other. A hundred interviews sitting on a drive are 100 hours, spread across whichever months you upload them in. Trint's unlimited plans exclude archival and bulk projects, which it defines as knowing the number of hours before you subscribe.
- Can I move my Trint transcripts over?
- Export them as SRT, VTT, or timestamped text and import the files into a project. Speakers and timings come across as turns you can search, tag, and cite, and an import spends none of your transcription hours.
- Does it handle video?
- Upload the recording and you get a speaker-labeled transcript with timestamps, searchable and quotable alongside every audio interview in the project.
- What does a year cost for one person?
- $144 on Solo for 20 audio hours a month, or $348 on Pro for 50. Prices are in USD and tax is added at checkout.
- What happens when my hours run out?
- New transcription pauses until the period rolls over or you change plan. The archive, search, tags, and export stay open.
Compared with the other tools
Put one interview through it tonight
Three audio hours are free and the archive stays open afterwards.