[EForEndeavour]

First, this $57.60 is a VERY pessimistic upper limit. Remember, that's based on having to transcribe every working hour of every day. The number of hours/month required for transcription is probably pareto-distributed among the workforce. I'd bet 90% of people would need to transcribe up to ~4 hours (1 important 1-hour meeting per week), corresponding to an API cost of USD$1.44 per month.

Second, don't underestimate the business value of a nice interface. IMO, the value of excellent UI/UX is part of why ChatGPT took off the way it did. The number of people willing to pay a few dollars per month in order to never have to see a command line is quite a bit larger than the number of people willing to host their own `whisper-large` inference.

Speaking of hosting, do you already own hardware that supports sufficiently fast inference? If not, how much would a good enough cloud instance cost you per month? It depends on how fast is fast enough, but more than $0, that's for sure.