Descript for D&D sessions: what 240 media minutes actually buys

The numbers, with sources

How we sourced this: Descript’s plan prices are deliberately absent from this table. The pricing page renders monthly and annual figures behind a client-side toggle and ships both states in the same HTML, so two reads of the page returned contradictory monthly/annual labels and we could not establish which figure belongs to which billing interval. Quoting a price we could not pin would be our guess presented as Descript’s number, so the row is omitted — check descript.com/pricing directly. The media-minute allowances were consistent across both reads.

Do the arithmetic before you pick a plan

Media minutes are consumed by imported or recorded media, not by how much of it you end up using. A four-hour session is 240 minutes the moment you upload it, whether you read the transcript or not.

That makes the plan maths simple, and slightly brutal for a weekly game. The free tier’s 60 minutes a month is a quarter of one session. Hobbyist’s 600 covers two and a half. Creator’s 1,800 covers seven and a half, which is a weekly game with room to spare. Business adds 600 more. The same arithmetic for six other tools is in our cost guide.

• One 4-hour session = 240 media minutes
• Free (60/month) = a quarter of one session
• Hobbyist (600/month) = about 2.5 sessions
• Creator (1,800/month) = about 7.5 sessions
• Business (2,400/month) = about 10 sessions

What you are actually paying for

The metering looks unkind only if you think of Descript as a transcription service. It is not. It is an editor where the transcript is the timeline — you delete a word and the audio goes with it — and that is a genuinely excellent way to cut a podcast. The transcript is the interface, not the product.

For a DM the transcript is the product, and everything downstream of it is what you wanted: who was in the scene, what they agreed to, what the party still owes a guild three sessions later. Descript has no opinion about any of that, because it was never trying to.

The name problem applies here too

Like every general transcription tool, Descript has never encountered your setting’s proper nouns and will render them by sound. You can fix them in the editor, and the editor is good, so it is less painful than most — but it is per session, forever, and nothing you fix in one session carries into the next. In DM Scribe a corrected name can go straight into your campaign glossary, which primes every later transcription.