Free tool · voice generation
AI voice cost calculator
Estimate what monthly TTS output costs on ElevenLabs and Speechify Studio — plan price, monthly credits, and cost per 100k characters. Estimates only: ElevenLabs credits are shared across TTS/STT and Speechify Studio credits are separate from the reader app.
Your monthly output
One hour of narration ≈ 60,000–90,000 characters depending on pacing. Adjust to your real production.
| Platform | Cheapest fitting plan | Plan price | Monthly credits | Est. cost / 100k chars | Notes |
|---|
Narration length converter
Plan a voiceover: enter your video length (or script word count) and see the estimated narration time, characters, and ElevenLabs credit cost. Assumptions are labeled and adjustable — real per-generation cost varies by voice, model, and pacing.
| Est. narration | Script length | ≈ Characters (ElevenLabs credits) | Cheapest ElevenLabs plan | Plan price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | — |
Assumptions: ~150 words/min default narration pace (adjustable); ~6 characters per word including spaces; ElevenLabs TTS ≈ 1 credit per character (official FAQ, source-cited 2026-08-15). Credits are shared across TTS/STT — a heavy STT user will burn credits faster.
What common voiceovers cost on ElevenLabs
At the default pace of 150 words a minute and about 6 characters per word, one minute of narration is roughly 900 characters, or 900 credits. The cheapest plan whose monthly pool covers each workload:
| Monthly narration | ≈ Credits | Cheapest plan | Plan price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 minutes | 9,000 | Free (no commercial license) | $0 |
| 30 minutes | 27,000 | Starter | $6/month |
| 2 hours | 108,000 | Creator | $22/month |
| 10 hours | 540,000 | Pro | $99/month |
Credits are shared with dubbing, music, and speech-to-text, and newer models can use more credits per character, so treat these as planning numbers and re-run them with the calculator above. ElevenLabs Starter at $6 a month is the cheapest plan that includes a commercial license.
What the numbers mean
ElevenLabs' free tier gives 10,000 credits/month — roughly 10k characters of TTS. Starter at $6/month adds 30,000 credits with a commercial license and instant voice cloning; Creator at $22/month (121,000 credits) adds professional voice cloning; Pro is $99/month for 600,000 credits. Speechify Studio's free plan gives 600 credits without commercial rights — monetized channels need a paid Studio plan (Starter $100/year, Creator $300/year); the Premium reader app ($29/month) is a separate product and does not include Studio generation credits.
Compare voice platforms in depth on the ElevenLabs vs Speechify comparison and the ElevenLabs vs Descript page, then verify the current plan page before subscribing.
Voice model news (checked Oct 13, 2026)
The plan table above is unchanged, but three things affect voice budgets. ElevenLabs published Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo on Sep 28, 2026 (ElevenLabs blog); the post lists no separate price, so credit use per character on the newer models may differ from the 1-credit-per-character planning rate used here. ElevenLabs models are also on OpenRouter since Oct 7, 2026, passed through without markup, with 50% off OpenRouter's list price until Oct 19, 2026, 8am PT (OpenRouter blog). If you build on OpenAI text-to-speech, its deprecations page lists tts-1, tts-1-hd and two dated gpt-4o-mini-tts snapshots for removal on Jan 6, 2027, with gpt-realtime-2.1-mini as the replacement (OpenAI deprecations).
Related tools
Run the AI video cost calculator or the AI music cost calculator for the rest of your creator stack, or see all voice tools on the voice category page.