Descript is $24, $35 or $65 a month. It runs three meters now, not two.

Free is $0 for 60 minutes of media a month, 100 AI credits as a one-off rather than monthly, 5 GB of storage, one seat, and 720p exports carrying a watermark.

Hobbyist is $24 a month, or $16 a month billed annually. 10 media hours a month, 400 AI credits a month, one person included.

Creator is $35 a month, or $24 billed annually. 30 media hours a month, 800 AI credits a month, and the page reads scale to a team of 3, billed separately.

Business is $65 a month, or $50 billed annually. 40 media hours a month, 1,500 AI credits a month, and scale to a team of 5, billed separately.

Enterprise is custom on every line.

Every figure above came off descript.com/pricing on 1 September 2026. If you are working from a comparison article written earlier in the year, check the number of allowances before you check the prices, because that is what moved.

Media hours and AI credits are two separate allowances and one can empty while the other is barely touched.

Media hours count what you upload or record inside the tool, whether or not you transcribe it. That is a wider definition than transcription hours, and it is the one that catches anybody who dumps a whole shoot in and picks through it later.

AI credits are spent by the AI features rather than by plain editing: the assistant, studio-grade audio cleanup, eye contact, green screen, generated voices and avatars. Hobbyist gets 400 a month, Creator 800, Business 1,500. The free plan gets 100 once.

So a forecast needs three numbers, not one, and most buyers arrive with the first. A team that transcribes little but leans on the AI tools will run out on the second meter while the first sits half used.

Both monthly meters reset monthly, so a heavy month cannot be smoothed by a quiet one. Plan against your busiest month rather than your average.

Hobbyist says one person included. Creator says scale to a team of 3, billed separately. Business says scale to a team of 5, billed separately (descript.com/pricing, 1 September 2026).

Read that carefully, because it is the line people misprice. $35 is not a team of three for $35. It is one editor at $35, with room to add two more at their own cost.

So the seat count is a multiplier on the sticker, not a feature of it. Three editors on Creator is three times $35 before anybody has uploaded anything.

Count creators rather than accounts. Reviewers can usually be sent a link or a finished file, and if approval is all they do they should not be on the invoice.

Review the count quarterly, because it only drifts upward. A team that grew from three to seven seats rarely grew from three to seven editors.

A weekly forty-five minute episode is three hours of recording a month before anybody says a word twice. Two hosts recorded on separate tracks can count as double, depending on how the allowance is defined.

Then add the interviews you record and abandon, the second takes, and the internal calls somebody wanted transcribed. Ten hours a month is a normal figure for one weekly show with guests, which is the entire Hobbyist allowance.

So count what you will feed the machine rather than what you will publish. The allowance is consumed at upload, and an episode you scrapped consumed it exactly like an episode you released.

Ask directly how multi-track recordings are counted before choosing a tier. It is the single question most likely to move you from $24 to $35.

Thirty three-minute takes is ninety minutes of source. Against Hobbyist's 10 media hours a month that is fifteen percent of the allowance, and the remaining eighty-five percent is capacity you are paying $24 for and will never reach.

That is the tell that you are buying the wrong shape of tool rather than the wrong tier. The meter is built around length while your problem is quantity at short length.

The operation matters more than the volume. A long-form workflow is subtractive: you have plenty of material and you remove what does not belong. Filler removal is the star feature and it earns its reputation.

A thirty-second ad is not a subtraction problem. It needs a hook that earns three seconds, evidence landing on specific words, and pacing designed rather than trimmed into place. No allowance size fixes a mismatch of operation.

For a short ad the bill can attach to the take rather than to the people. Cutroom works that way and no seat ever appears on the invoice.

A batch is 100 credits and covers transcription, the director pass and the b-roll search. Export is 20 credits per output minute, so a thirty-second ad is 110 credits from upload to file. Adding an approver costs nothing at all.

You direct on the transcript. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Delete a line and the cut rebuilds. Change the pace and the whole edit re-cuts. Those edits are free, and only export bills again.

Three finished videos are free in your first 7 days, no card. A free export carries a Cutroom mark across the middle of the picture. Lite is $19.99 a month, Basic $39.99 for 2,500 credits and Premium $79.99 for 5,000.

The plain facts beside those numbers: one take of three minutes maximum, one speaker, 9:16 only, and no shared workspace. A podcast, a course module or a webinar belongs in a long-form editor.