Limits – Realtime transcription

Learn about the limits for the Speechmatics Realtime API

Speechmatics limits the number of hours of audio users can process each month to help manage load on our servers. The current limits (in hours) by account type are listed in the table below:

	Max. hours per month	Max. concurrent sessions
Free Tier	4	2
Paid Tier	6,000	20
Enterprise	Custom	Custom

Please reach out to Support if you need to increase the above limits.

Session limits

Real-time SaaS sessions will be automatically ended if any of the following criteria are met:

• Session duration reaches 48 hours
• No audio data (AddAudio messages) sent for 1 hour
• No audio or ping/pongs sent for 3 minutes.

When a session is automatically ended, the Real-time SaaS service will send an in-band error followed by a closing handshake with code 1008. For more information, see the Real-time API Reference.

Guidance for users

Clients can disconnect a session before it is automatically terminated and immediately reconnect a new session. Note that new sessions will typically start in less than a second. If seamless transition is required, the new session can be connected a few seconds before disconnecting the old session.

Since unpredictable network issues can cause WebSocket connections to be dropped, we recommend graceful handling of session termination for long-running sessions.

Data retention limits

Speechmatics Realtime SaaS does not store audio files, transcripts, or configuration data.