Pricing · मराठी
Marathi speech data: what it costs
Per-hour cost bands for Marathi speech data collection, why 6 dialect varieties change the number, and worked budgets at three common volumes.
- Language
- Marathi (mr-IN)
- Rate band
- ₹3,200 – ₹6,500 / hour
- Speakers
- 99M
- Studio cities
- 6
Why Marathi prices the way it does
Marathi has roughly 99 million speakers concentrated in Maharashtra, Goa, parts of Karnataka, which sets how quickly a cohort can be recruited. Recruitment speed, not recording time, is the dominant cost in almost every programme.
A representative Marathi cohort should be split roughly 40% western Maharashtra, 25% Vidarbha, 20% Marathwada, 15% Konkan rather than concentrated in Pune.
- Mumbai and Pune speech mixes Marathi, Hindi, and English in the same sentence. Marathi-only recordings collected in Pune under-represent the Mumbai reality of tri-lingual switching.
- Available Marathi speech data is dominated by standard Puneri read speech. Vidarbha, Marathwada, and coastal Konkan varieties are severely under-collected, which is exactly where deployed voice products lose accuracy.
Worked budgets
| Volume | Typical speakers | Indicative range | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 hours | 200 at 30 min | ₹3,20,000 – ₹6,50,000 | 3-6 weeks |
| 500 hours | 1,000 at 30 min | ₹14,72,000 – ₹29,90,000 | 6-10 weeks |
| 1,000 hours | 2,000 at 30 min | ₹27,20,000 – ₹55,25,000 | 10-16 weeks |
Unit rates fall with volume because setup, script design and recruiter onboarding are amortised, not because quality is relaxed.
Cost drivers specific to this language
- Dialect spread: covering Standard (Puneri), Varhadi (Vidarbha), Marathwadi, Konkani-influenced coastal Marathi rather than one prestige variety adds recruitment cost but is what makes the corpus usable in production
- Script and transcription: Devanagari transcription needs native reviewers, and ळ vs ल substitution by Hindi-trained transcribers is the usual source of rework
- Phonetics: Retains the retroflex lateral ळ, which has no Hindi or English equivalent and is frequently substituted with ल by non-native transcribers, which requires reviewers trained on the language rather than generic annotators
Add-ons and their pricing
| Layer | Unit | Indicative |
|---|---|---|
| Verbatim transcription | per audio hour | ₹900 – ₹2,400 |
| Speaker diarisation and turn labels | per audio hour | ₹600 – ₹1,500 |
| Event and noise tagging | per audio hour | ₹400 – ₹1,100 |
| Romanised parallel transcript | per audio hour | ₹500 – ₹1,200 |
| Speaker-disjoint train/dev/test splits | one-off | Included |
How to get the number down without hurting the model
- Widen the age bands before you widen the dialect spread — dialect coverage is what determines production accuracy
- Use quiet-room capture where deployment audio is not studio-clean anyway
- Order transcription in a second phase once the audio passes acceptance
- Run a 10-20 hour pilot; specification errors caught there are the cheapest ones you will ever fix
Frequently asked
What is the per-hour rate for Marathi speech data?
Indicatively ₹3,200 to ₹6,500 per delivered hour for standard scripted or spontaneous capture with verbatim transcription. Narrow cohorts and studio-only capture sit at the top of that band.
Is Marathi more expensive than Hindi?
No — it sits in the same tier as Hindi, because the recruitment pool is deep enough to fill cohorts quickly in multiple cities.
Do you quote in INR or USD?
Either. Bands here are in INR; international clients are usually invoiced in USD at a fixed contract rate.
What is included in the quoted rate?
Recruitment, consent capture, recording, QA, transcription if ordered, metadata, delivery packaging and a perpetual licence with full IP transfer.
Related pages
Price a Marathi dataset
Tell us hours, speakers and dialect spread for Marathi and you get a fixed price against it.