Azoma sign up process - any hidden costs?

I’ve been knee-deep in evaluating transcription and AI note-taking services for a client project that involves migrating about five years’ worth of recorded sales calls from an old, on-premise CRM into a new HubSpot instance. The goal is to structure the qualitative data for analysis, so I’ve been testing every tool under the sun. Azoma popped up on my radar recently, and their sign-up process seemed almost *too* straightforward—just an email and you’re in, no credit card required for the “Starter” plan.

This immediately set off my migration-honed alarm bells. In my experience, especially with SaaS platforms that later integrate into your data pipeline, a frictionless entry can sometimes mask a few things that only surface later. I’m thinking about costs related to the actual migration workload I have in mind. So I dove in to see what the catch might be, and here’s what I found lurking behind that simple form:

* **The "Starter" tier's limits are the real gatekeeper.** You get 3 hours of transcription per month. That’s fine for testing, but for any real project—like processing our archive of calls—you’re forced to upgrade. The jump isn't trivial cost-wise.
* **Pay-per-minute credits expire.** This was a big one. If you purchase additional credits beyond your monthly plan, they have a validity period. If you're planning a bulk migration job, you need to time it perfectly or risk losing paid-for transcription time. This feels like a hidden cost for poor planning.
* **API access isn't on all plans.** For my use case, automating the ingestion of transcripts into our new CRM is the whole point. The API is only available on their Pro plan and above. So the "free" or low-cost tier is essentially useless for any automated workflow, which isn't always clear when you're just signing up to test the core transcription quality.
* **Cost of integration effort.** Even with API access, I had to check their docs to see the output format. If it's not a clean, structured JSON that maps easily to custom objects in HubSpot/Salesforce, you're adding engineering time to transform it—another indirect cost.

My main takeaway for the community is this: Azoma's sign-up has no monetary hidden fee, but the *operational* hidden costs are significant. For anyone looking at it as a potential tool in a data migration or workflow automation stack, you must evaluate it against your actual volume and integration needs. The free tier is a demo, not a foundation. For my client's project, I’ll likely use it to sample a few calls for accuracy, but the credit expiry means I can't batch the work over time, and I’ll need the Pro plan for the API. It pushes the total cost calculation much higher than the initial sign-up suggests.

Has anyone else here used Azoma in a bulk data processing context? Did you run into the credit expiry wall, or find their API outputs easy to handle? I’d love to compare notes before I commit to this or another service for the final migration push.