AI voice cost calculator
Four vendors, four different meters — characters, seconds, hours a year and one-time packs. Enter the minutes you actually need and see what a finished minute costs on each, on the cheapest plan that covers you.
Quick answer: the cheapest tool changes with volume, which is why a static table can’t answer this. At 30 finished minutes a month ElevenLabs Starter wins at $0.20 a minute ($6/mo). At 60 minutes Starter no longer covers you and Narakeet takes over at $0.14 ($100 pack, ~$8.33/mo) while ElevenLabs jumps to Creator at $0.37. By 480 minutes Narakeet holds at $0.087 with Speechify Studio Creator close behind at $0.10. Sticker price never predicts the order, because no two of these meter the same unit.
At 60 finished minutes a month, Narakeet is cheapest — 1,000-minute pack at $8.33 a month, about $0.139 per finished minute. Next is Speechify Studio at $0.317.
| Tool | Cheapest covering plan | Cost | Per finished minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Narakeet | 1,000-minute pack | $8.33/mo | $0.139/min |
| 2. Speechify Studio | Studio Starter | $19.00/mo | $0.317/min |
| 3. Murf AI | Creator (annual) · 1 editor seat | $19.00/mo | $0.317/min |
| 4. ElevenLabs | Creator | $22.00/mo | $0.367/min |
| NaturalReader | No published minute conversion | — | — |
Plan prices and allowances are vendor-published figures, each verified on the pricing breakdown linked in the workings. Conversions use the vendor's own stated rate where one exists (Speechify: 1 credit = 1 second; Murf: hours per year) and our published bench measurement where it does not (ElevenLabs: ~835 credits per finished minute). Figures assume every take is final — budget 2–3 takes for expressive work. Confirm the live checkout before subscribing.
Why AI voice pricing can’t be compared from the pricing pages
Every other calculator on this site converts one vendor’s credits into minutes. This one exists because that is not the question buyers actually have. They have a volume — a weekly video, a course, an audiobook — and four plans priced in units that cannot be held against each other. ElevenLabs meters characters and never publishes a minutes figure. Speechify meters seconds and does. Murf meters an annual pool of hours. Narakeet does not subscribe at all.
The ordering changes with volume, which is the part a static comparison table cannot show. At a few minutes a month the cheapest paid entry wins on sticker alone. In the low hundreds of minutes, Narakeet’s non-expiring packs and ElevenLabs’ credit ladder pull ahead of per-seat studio plans. Push past what any published tier covers and the honest answer is that the vendor has not priced your volume — which the table says rather than extrapolating.
Two things this deliberately will not do. It will not rank NaturalReader, because no published credit-to-minute rule exists and inventing one would make the whole table untrustworthy. And it will not show a free tier as the winner when that tier forbids commercial use — the question is what publishable audio costs. Per-tool detail lives in the cheapest AI voice generator comparison and the AI voice bench standings.
What each vendor actually meters
ElevenLabs — credits ≈ characters of text. ElevenLabs meters ~1 credit per character, which tells you nothing about minutes. We measured ~835 credits per finished minute across two published bench runs (991 characters → 72s, and 3,308 → 234s) and convert with that. Your pacing and retake rate move it. Verified pricing →
Speechify Studio — credits, 1 per second of voiceover. Speechify publishes the rate outright — 1 credit per second of voiceover — so 60 credits is a finished minute, no measurement needed. Dubbing costs 3× and avatar video 30× from the same pool, so an avatar project collapses these numbers. Verified pricing →
Murf AI — hours of generation per year. Murf meters an annual pool of generation hours, so the monthly figure is that pool ÷ 12. The annual shape is the catch the sticker price hides: a heavy month eats the year, and every self-serve tier caps at one editor seat. Verified pricing →
Narakeet — one-time minute packs. Narakeet has no subscription: minutes are the unit already, sold in packs that never expire. The monthly figure below is the cheapest pack covering a year at your volume, divided by 12 — so it is a budgeting equivalent, not a recurring charge. Verified pricing →
NaturalReader — credits per month (commercial plans). NaturalReader's commercial plans meter 500,000 credits a month on Starter and 2,000,000 on Creator, but the vendor publishes no characters- or seconds-per-credit rule. We will not invent one, so NaturalReader is listed but not ranked — test it against your own scripts. Verified pricing →
AI voice cost FAQ
Cite this calculator
Free to reference or quote. The rates come from each vendor's published plan pricing, normalised to cost per finished minute, read on July 2026 — cite that date, not the day you read this page, so the figure stays checkable.
ToolProven. “AI Voice Cost Calculator.” Rates verified July 2026. https://toolproven.com/tools/ai-voice-cost-calculator