AI Voice Generator Pricing (2026): Cost Calculator for 13 Tools

AI voice generator pricing looks simple until you try to compare it. One tool sells credits, another sells characters, a third sells hours, and a fourth sells "download minutes". Some free plans reset monthly, others give you a one-time allowance. Several pricing pages default to annual billing, so the price you see first is not the price you'll pay month to month.

We read every pricing page ourselves, converted each plan to a monthly cost for a real amount of audio, and checked whether you're actually allowed to use the result commercially. The tables below are the result.

What 60 and 300 minutes a month cost

Both tables assume you need commercial rights and pay monthly. Sixty minutes a month is roughly four to eight YouTube videos with voiceover; 300 minutes is a weekly podcast or a small course catalog.

Change the minutes, switch between monthly and annual billing, or turn off the commercial requirement to include plans that don't allow it.

How AI voice pricing actually works

Everything is sold in a different unit. ElevenLabs charges one credit per character on its website. Fish Audio says a minute of speech uses roughly 600 to 625 credits. Listnr describes 20,000 credits a month as ~120 min. Murf and WellSaid skip credits entirely and sell time. A "credit" means something different at almost every company, so comparing credit counts across tools tells you nothing.

We compare minutes, using the vendor's own estimate first. Most vendors print an approximate number of minutes next to each plan, and we use that figure. When a vendor only states characters, we estimate 1,000 characters per minute of speech and mark the result as an estimate. That's close to a natural speaking pace and matches ElevenLabs' own plan comparison.

Vendors don't always agree with themselves. Fish Audio's Plus plan includes 250,000 credits a month, which the plan card says is ~200 min of speech. At the 600 to 625 credits per minute Fish Audio states elsewhere, the same credits would be about 400 minutes. We use the lower figure the plan card states, because that's what the vendor commits to.

Some prices are per seat. These plans are priced per person: Async, Descript, NaturalReader Team and WellSaid Labs Business. The tables assume one seat; a team of three pays three times as much.

Five things the pricing pages don't make obvious

1. Free plans are almost never for commercial use. 8 of the 12 free plans we checked say so explicitly. ElevenLabs and Typecast also require you to credit them on anything you publish from a free plan. If your video is monetized, the free plan is for testing voices, not for publishing.

2. "Commercial license" can come with conditions. Typecast's Basic and Plus plans include a commercial license, but its help center says YouTube creators earning AdSense revenue must be on the Pro plan. Typecast appears in our 60-minute table at its Pro price because Basic (~35 min) and Plus (~50 min) don't include 60 minutes a month. If you earn YouTube ad revenue, you need Pro anyway.

3. Some terms are unclear or contradictory. MiniMax Audio's plan cards describe commercial rights for songs, while its general terms of service contain a clause against commercial use of the services. Descript's pricing page and terms say you own your output but never explicitly grant commercial rights. We don't rank either as "commercial" until the vendor says so clearly.

4. Free allowances aren't always monthly. Typecast's free plan is 3,000 credits for the lifetime of the account, not per month. Listnr's is 1,000 credits, one time. A free plan that looks generous may run out after a single video.

5. Some prices are only shown as annual. Listnr's monthly/annual switch didn't work when we checked, so only the annual price was visible. We show its price with a note rather than leaving it out.

Monthly vs annual billing

Paying for a year up front lowers the monthly price by 10% to 52%, depending on the tool. That's worth it once you've settled on a voice and a workflow, not before. Several pricing pages open on the annual view by default, so check which price you're looking at before comparing.

APIs: much cheaper, but you build the workflow

If you're a developer, cloud text-to-speech APIs cost a fraction of a creator subscription. Amazon Polly's Standard voices cost $4 per million characters, and Google's legacy Standard voices cost $4 per million characters. Current-generation voices cost more: Google Chirp 3 HD costs $30 per million characters, OpenAI tts-1-hd costs $30 per million characters and Amazon Polly Generative costs $30 per million characters. Even at that price, 60 minutes of speech on OpenAI tts-1-hd costs $1.80.

The catch is that an API gives you raw audio and nothing else. There's no editor for fixing pronunciation, no voice library to browse, and usually no voice cloning at the entry level. You also need to check each provider's terms yourself; the API table below shows price only.

Tools we couldn't price, and why

We list these tools because people ask about them, but we won't invent numbers their pricing pages don't give.

• Descript doesn't state commercial rights explicitly, and its AI credits cover several features, not only speech.
• NaturalReader charges credits per character, but the rate depends on which voice you use, and the rates aren't published.
• Speechify Studio only shows annual totals, and doesn't say whether its plan credits are per month or per year.
• Synthesys now sells an AI video platform. Voiceover doesn't consume credits, and there's no voice-only plan to compare.
• Uberduck doesn't publish how its credits convert to minutes of speech.

Shut down or pivoted

• Play.ht: when we checked on September 30, 2026, play.ht no longer resolved and the certificate for app.play.ht had expired. We found no official announcement. See our Play.ht alternatives guide.
• LOVO (Genny): every page on its site returned an HTTP 402 error when we checked, and there's no official announcement. We treat it as shut down.
• Resemble AI announced on August 13, 2026 that it had moved to deepfake detection and is no longer taking new customers for its voice products.

Prices change often in this category. We re-check every tool each month, and the date at the top of this page tells you when we last did.