Narration cost calculator
Voice is the one line item whose cost depends on your tool and your volume — everything else in a faceless channel can be free. Put in how much you narrate and this compares what it costs through each vendor, including the free allowances, and names the ElevenLabs plan that fits if you would rather not write code.
Disclosure: some links on this page earn us a commission if you subscribe, at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend — where a free or cheaper tool wins, we say so.
You would render about 48 minutes a month — roughly 43,200 characters.
| Option | Per month | What that assumes |
|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud TTS Standard / WaveNet | $0 | Inside the 4,000,000-character free allowance. Billing must be enabled; overage bills automatically. |
| Google Cloud TTS Neural2 | $0 | Inside the 1,000,000-character free allowance. Billing must be enabled; overage bills automatically. |
| Google Cloud TTS Chirp 3: HD | $0 | Inside the 1,000,000-character free allowance. Billing must be enabled; overage bills automatically. |
| Google Cloud TTS Studio | $0 | Inside the 1,000,000-character free allowance. Billing must be enabled; overage bills automatically. |
| ElevenLabs Free | $0 | No commercial licence, and 10,000 credits would not cover the volume anyway. |
| OpenAI tts-1 | 65¢ | 43,200 characters at $15 per million |
| OpenAI tts-1-hd | $1.30 | 43,200 characters at $30 per million |
| ElevenLabs Creator | $22 | 121,000 credits a month; you would use about 36%. Unused credits roll over for up to two months, then lapse. |
What this assumes
- ElevenLabs bills about 1 credit per character, its historical rate. A plan "fits" when its monthly credits cover your characters; anything unused is wasted, which is why the subscription's real per-minute cost is higher than the headline for anyone under their cap.
- Google's free allowances need billing enabled. Google's page is explicit that you must enable billing to use Text-to-Speech, and overage is charged automatically. Set a budget alert. The allowances are 4 million characters a month for Standard and WaveNet voices and 1 million for the newer ones.
- The ElevenLabs free plan is shown but never recommended. It carries no commercial licence and requires "elevenlabs.io" in the video title, so it cannot publish on a monetized channel. Why that matters.
- Quality is not on this page. Google's Standard voices sound like a satnav and a premium voice is immediately audible. If the voice is part of your channel's identity, the cheaper number is not automatically the right one. The narration cost comparison covers what the money buys.
- Prices were read from the vendors' pricing pages on 2026-08-28, not from our own invoices. They change often — check the vendor before committing.
The plans behind the numbers
| ElevenLabs plan | Monthly | Credits | ≈ minutes at 900/min |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $6 | 30,000 | 33 |
| Creator | $22 | 121,000 | 134 |
| Pro | $99 | 600,000 | 667 |
| Scale | $299 | 1,800,000 | 2,000 |
| Business | $990 | 6,000,000 | 6,667 |
| API | Per 1M characters | Free a month |
|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud TTS Standard / WaveNet | $4 | 4,000,000 |
| OpenAI tts-1 | $15 | — |
| Google Cloud TTS Neural2 | $16 | 1,000,000 |
| OpenAI tts-1-hd | $30 | — |
| Google Cloud TTS Chirp 3: HD | $30 | 1,000,000 |
| Google Cloud TTS Studio | $160 | 1,000,000 |
Next step
You have a voice budget. Everything else in a faceless channel can be free without compromise — what a channel costs to run per month shows where the $6 starter setup sits against the whole picture, and where the time actually goes is the cost this page cannot count.