Descript details checked October 2026 · Updated 2026-10-22
AI Growth Kit vs Descript
If you caption video on any kind of recurring basis, pick Descript: plain auto-captions are billed against its media-hour allowance, not its AI credits, so a paid plan effectively captions as much video as you upload that month for a flat fee — and it exports a separate SRT or VTT file, which we don't. For a single one-off caption job, or if a watermark and 720p are fine, AI Growth Kit (or Descript's own Free plan) costs less. Descript's translated-voiceover feature needs its $50-a-month Business plan; ours would normally be the simpler way to get one, but it's temporarily paused, so there's no price on our side to set against it right now.
| AI Growth Kit | Descript | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Credits, no subscription needed. Packs: $9 for 200, $29 for 750, $59 for 1,800, never expiring. Plans: $19 a month for 600, $49 for 2,000. | Per editor: Hobbyist $24, Creator $35, Business $65 a month, or $192, $288 and $600 a year billed yearly ($16, $24 and $50 a month). Enterprise: custom. |
| Free plan | 20 credits once, at sign-up (10 seconds of subtitles). No watermark. | 1 media hour (60 minutes) a month, 100 AI credits granted once, not monthly. Exports are 720p with a Descript watermark. |
| Auto-captions | 2 credits per second (120 a minute), 20 spoken languages. No editor to fix lines before burn-in. | Generated from the transcript and billed against media hours, not AI credits — captioning itself doesn't touch the monthly AI-credit allowance at all. Click any line in the transcript to fix it before export. |
| Caption file export | Burned-in MP4 only. | Burns into the exported video like ours, or downloads separately as an SRT or VTT file, with options for speaker labels and a maximum line length. |
| Caption translation | Into another of the 20 languages at the same 2-credits-a-second rate, whether or not you also burn in the original. | 67 languages and regional variants. Spends AI credits on any plan, since captioning itself doesn't; correcting a translated line by hand needs Business or Enterprise, and translating into more than 4 languages at once can slow down. |
| Translated audio | A new video with a translated, time-aligned audio track in one of 25 languages, 2 credits per second — temporarily paused. | 30+ languages with proofread, bundled only into the $50-a-month Business plan ($65 month-to-month) — not available on Free, Hobbyist or Creator at any price. |
| Editing | None: each tool takes one input and returns one file. | A full text-based editor: cut video by deleting words from its transcript, or let Underlord, its AI co-editor, do it from a typed instruction. |
| Upload and export limits | MP4, MOV or WebM, up to 30 minutes per video. | No published per-file length limit — bounded instead by your plan's monthly media hours (1 to 40) and export resolution (720p on Free, 1080p on Hobbyist, 4K on Creator and up). |
| Watermark | None, including output paid for with the free credits. | On Free exports only; none on Hobbyist, Creator, Business or Enterprise. |
| Team seats | None: one login, one credit balance. | Hobbyist: 1 person included. Creator scales to a team of 3, Business to 5 — each extra seat billed separately. |
Where Descript is clearly better
Descript is a full text-based video editor, not a set of single-purpose tools: cut a video by deleting words from its transcript, or hand that job to Underlord, its AI co-editor. For captions specifically, the gap is wide because of how it bills — auto-captions are generated from the transcript and charged against Descript's media-hour allowance, not its AI credits, so a paid plan effectively captions as much video as you upload that month at no extra charge. It also exports a separate SRT or VTT subtitle file; our Subtitler only burns captions into the video.
Its caption translator reaches much further, too: 67 languages and regional variants against our 20. Translating already-captioned video into another language still only spends AI credits, not a fresh media-hour charge.
Where AI Growth Kit is better
No subscription at any volume: a $9–$59 pack is a one-time purchase that never expires, and failed jobs are refunded. Descript sells no pay-once option — a single caption job needs an active plan, or the capped, watermarked Free tier.
The same balance also pays for 4K upscaling and short AI-generated video clips. Descript lists no AI video upscaler among its tools; its 4K export (Creator and up) is a resolution ceiling for your own footage, not a claim that it sharpens lower-resolution video. It does generate AI video, but only from its Creator plan up, inside a subscription.
A translated audio track is gated to Descript's $50-a-month Business plan, with nothing below it at any price. Our Translator would normally be the simpler way to get one without a subscription — but it's temporarily paused right now, so there's no AI Growth Kit price to set against Descript's dubbing feature.
What a caption job costs
Our rate is 2 credits per second (120 a minute): $5.40 a minute in $9 Starter Packs (200 credits), $3.93 in the $59 Power Pack (1,800 credits), $2.94 on a fully used $49 Pro plan (2,000 credits). Descript bills captioning by the media hour, not the AI credit, so its cost per minute is just its flat plan price spread over however much video that plan covers in a month — Free costs $0 for up to 60 minutes, Hobbyist $16 a month billed yearly (or $24 month-to-month) for up to 600 minutes, Creator $24 a month billed yearly (or $35 month-to-month) for up to 1,800.
A single 3-minute video, captioned once: 3 × 120 = 360 credits, so two $9 Starter Packs (400 credits) for $18, one time. Descript: $0, inside Free's 60-minute monthly cap — with a watermark and a 720p ceiling as the only cost.
20 minutes of captions every month: 20 × 120 = 2,400 credits. The $49 Pro plan covers 2,000 and two Starter Packs cover the remaining 400, about $67 a month. The same 20 minutes sits inside Free's 60-minute cap too ($0, watermarked), or inside Hobbyist's 600-minute cap for a flat $16 a month billed yearly ($24 month-to-month) with no watermark and 1080p export. Hobbyist's flat fee costs the same as our Starter Pack rate ($5.40 a minute) at about 3 minutes a month billed yearly, or 4½ month-to-month; against our cheapest pack rate (Power, $3.93 a minute) the break-even is about 4 minutes billed yearly, or 6 month-to-month — past that, Descript's flat fee wins by a widening margin.
At Free's exact ceiling, 60 minutes in one month: 60 × 120 = 7,200 credits. The Pro plan's 2,000 plus Power-Pack-rate top-ups for the remaining 5,200 (5,200 ÷ 1,800 × $59 ≈ $170.44) comes to about $219.44 on our side. Descript Free still covers the same 60 minutes for $0 that month, watermarked and capped at 720p; Hobbyist clears it with 540 minutes of headroom left over for $16–$24.
How to decide
Start from how many minutes of video you caption in a typical month, and whether a watermark or 720p is acceptable for something small.
- More than about 3–6 minutes of captions a month, an SRT/VTT file, or editing the video itself: Descript.
- One very short job where a watermark and 720p are fine: Descript's own Free plan costs nothing, for up to an hour of video a month.
- A translated audio track right now: neither directly — Descript's needs its $50-a-month Business plan, and ours is temporarily paused.
- A one-off job with no plan to size, 4K upscaling, or an AI-generated video clip without a subscription: AI Growth Kit.
Choose Descript if…
- You caption more than about 3–6 minutes a month: past that, even Hobbyist's flat $16 (billed yearly) or $24 (month-to-month) costs less than our per-second credits.
- You need a downloadable SRT or VTT file, not just a burned-in video.
- You want to edit the video itself — cut by deleting words from the transcript, or hand it to Underlord — not just get one finished file back.
- You need caption translation beyond our 20 languages: Descript lists 67, including several regional variants.
- You need a translated voiceover and don't mind paying for Business: $50 a month billed yearly adds dubbing in 30+ languages with proofread.
- A single short clip where a watermark and 720p are fine: Free costs nothing, for up to an hour of video a month.
Choose AI Growth Kit if…
- You want a caption job done without signing up for any plan: a $9 pack is a one-time purchase that never expires, and failed jobs are refunded.
- You also want 4K upscaling or a short AI-generated video clip from Seedance 2.0, Kling 3.0 or Veo 3.1, priced the same simple way as captions.
- You want one flat, published per-second rate before you upload, instead of tracking a monthly media-hour cap and a separate AI-credit balance.
- You process only a few minutes a year and don't want a watermark — Free is Descript's only no-cost option, and it has one.
Questions
Does Descript's Free plan include caption translation or a translated voiceover?
Translating captions into another language spends AI credits on any plan, including Free's one-time 100 — so a small amount is possible, but Free's allowance runs out fast. A translated voiceover (dubbing) is a Business-only feature from $50 a month billed yearly, regardless of how many AI credits you have.
Can I export Descript's captions as a file?
Yes — its Export dialog has a Subtitles tab with .srt and .vtt formats, plus options like speaker labels and a maximum line length. Our Subtitler only returns a video with captions burned into the picture; there's no separate file yet.
Can I use both?
Yes. Caption and edit routine video in Descript for the file export and its flat media-hour pricing; use our Subtitler for a one-off clip with no subscription, our 4K Upscaler, which Descript doesn't have, or AI video generation without a subscription (Descript generates AI video only from its Creator plan up).