Methodology: How We Check AI Voice Tools

This page explains how we collect and check the data behind every table on VoiceJury. It covers only what we do today.

Where the data comes from

We use only the vendor's own sites: pricing pages, help centers, terms of service and official announcements. We open each page in a real browser and read it after it has fully loaded. We don't use third-party reviews, news reports or price-tracking sites.

We read pages in a browser because automated fetching tools can return stale copies. When we checked Play.ht and LOVO on October 9, 2026, a fetching tool returned normal-looking homepages and pricing pages that turned out to be old cached copies, while the live sites couldn't be reached. At Voicemaker, fetched prices and allowances didn't match what the pricing page showed in a browser. We record what the browser shows.

Prices

We select monthly billing where the site offers it and record that price, along with the annual price per month. If a site only shows annual pricing, we record that price and label it "billed annually; monthly price not shown on official site." Plans with custom pricing, usually Enterprise, aren't listed. Plans priced per person are marked per seat, and our tables assume one seat. The pricing calculator applies these rules to every tool.

Minutes

Plans are sold in credits, characters, minutes or hours, so we compare minutes:

• If the vendor states approximate minutes for a plan, we use its figure.
• If the vendor bills per character and says what a character costs in credits, we estimate 1,000 characters ≈ 1 minute of speech and label the result as an estimate.
• If neither is available, we show "Not verified" and leave the plan out of rankings.
• When a vendor's own pages disagree, we use the more conservative number and say so on the page.
• Yearly allowances count as one-twelfth per month when we compare monthly needs.

Unknown allowance periods do not count as monthly quotas. Calculator results use only prices verified for the selected billing cycle; annual results show both the monthly equivalent and the full-year charge. Conditional commercial results are separated because the calculator cannot confirm your specific use case.

Commercial licenses

We give every plan one of three commercial statuses, based on the vendor's own wording:

• Clear: the official site grants commercial use in plain words. Example: Voicemaker Starter.
• Conditional: the site grants commercial use with stated limits. Example: Typecast Basic. Help center: YouTube creators earning AdSense revenue must use the Pro plan.
• Unclear: the wording is missing or contradicts itself. Example: MiniMax Audio Starter. Commercial-use wording on the plan cards mentions songs only, and the general Terms of Service contain a clause prohibiting commercial use of the Services.

Clear and conditional plans count as commercial. Unclear plans never do: we show their prices separately and never rank them first. We record free plans separately, including whether they require attribution. The license checker shows the status of every tool.

Shut down and pivoted tools

We decide a tool's status only from what we can observe on its own sites and from its official announcements. We don't rely on third-party reports, even when they say a tool has closed.

• Unavailable when checked: we could not access the product, for example because its domain did not resolve, its certificate had expired or checked pages returned errors. We record the observation and its date. These failures alone do not confirm a permanent shutdown.
• Confirmed shut down: the vendor officially announced that the product closed. We link the announcement and record its date. Without that confirmation, an inaccessible product is marked unavailable instead.
• Pivoted: the vendor announced that it stopped selling voice products to new customers or moved to a different business. We quote the announcement and its date.
• A rename isn't a pivot. Async, formerly Podcastle, kept its voice plans and prices, so we treat it as active.

For an example of a tool that was unavailable when checked, see our guide to Play.ht alternatives.

How often we check

We check every tool once a month. Each month's raw record is saved unchanged under its date. Corrections and judgment calls, such as choosing the more conservative of two numbers, go into a separate log with the reason. The "Verified on" date on each page is the date of the data check, not the date the page was last edited.

A public verification example

Example: Typecast Basic

Checked 2026-11-03. Official allowance wording: 30,000/month (~35 mins).

Recorded commercial status: conditional. Help center: YouTube creators earning AdSense revenue must use the Pro plan.

This is a recorded restriction, not an audio-quality test or permission for every use case.

• https://typecast.ai/pricing
• https://help.typecast.ai/en/articles/13448178-terms-of-use
• https://typecast.ai/policy/
• https://typecast.ai/guideline

Editorial change log

• 2026-10-01: Changed Play.ht and LOVO from confirmed shutdown to unavailable when checked. Access failures alone do not establish a shutdown. Original verification dates were preserved.
• 2026-10-03: Separated billing cycles in the calculator, highlighted conditional rights, and added direct pricing sources. These are editorial and calculation changes, not new vendor checks.

Every tool we track

We re-check every tool each month, and the table above shows when we last did.