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Costs & earning

Speechify AI pricing and free plan limits

Speechify AI's free plan is 50,000 characters a month with commercial use, and Starter is $10 for 1M characters, about $0.009 a minute of narration.

Research-led · from vendor docs, not hands-on use 8 min read 2026-09-08 Contains affiliate links

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.

Two things carry the Speechify name, and a search for “Speechify pricing” lands on the wrong one for a faceless channel. Speechify is a consumer reading app that turns articles and PDFs into audio for you to listen to. Speechify AI is the text-to-speech API, sold to people who build things, that turns a script into an audio file you can put in a video. This page is about the second one. Its pricing lives at speechify.ai, not speechify.com, and the two are priced on different units for different customers.

The reason it is worth a page of its own is one line on one plan card.

The free plan

Speechify AI’s free plan is 50,000 characters a month, described on the pricing page as a “hard cap”, and the card says “Commercial use · community support”. At the 900-characters-a-minute conversion this site uses, 50,000 characters is about 55 minutes of narration a month. Roughly seven 8-minute videos, before retakes.

That is unusual. ElevenLabselevenlabs.io · affiliate’ free plan carries no commercial licence and asks for its name in your video title; Murf’s free plan cannot export a file; Fliki’s is watermarked. The free-plan article goes through all three. Speechify AI is the one vendor among the four whose free tier says, on the plan card, that it can be used commercially, which for a channel means a monetized upload is inside the terms rather than outside them.

Two conditions come with it, and they are in the AI Voice API terms rather than on the pricing page.

  1. A credit line. Section 6.3 has the customer “display the following phrase ‘Voices powered by Speechify’ in a visible manner to at least one (1) Customer Product for the duration of the Agreement”. For a channel, a product is the channel; a line in the about page or the standard description block satisfies “visible”. It is not the title, which is the difference from ElevenLabs’ free tier.
  2. An AI-generated disclosure. Section 1.4 requires that “each and every use of Synthetic Output … will include or embed commercially reasonable disclosures clearly indicating that the Synthetic Output is AI-generated and not a human voice”. YouTube’s own altered-content disclosure covers realistic synthetic media already, so for most channels this is a checkbox you were going to tick anyway, plus a line in the description.

Neither condition switches off when you start paying. They are terms of the API, not of the free plan, so budget for them on Starter too.

The hard cap is the other thing to understand. “Hard cap” means the service stops at 50,000 characters; it does not bill you for the 50,001st. Google’s free tier works the same way in the other direction, as a monthly allowance that is free before billing starts, and the difference matters for how you plan a month. On Speechify AI’s free plan, a busy month means waiting for the first of the next one.

Starter: $10 for a million characters

The first paid tier is Starter at $10 a month, which includes 1 million characters and then bills overage at $10 per million. The card calls this “auto top-up overages — no hard cap”, which is the honest way to describe a subscription that behaves like a meter above its allowance.

A million characters at 900 a minute is about 1,100 minutes, or roughly 18 hours of narration. Per minute, that is $0.009, and because the overage rate equals the included rate, the figure holds whether you use 1 million characters or 3 million. It only rises if you use less: a channel that narrates two hours a month on Starter is paying $10 for about $1.08 worth of characters, which is what any subscription does below its allowance. Above it, the price is a meter.

An 8-minute video is about 7,200 characters, so about 7 cents out of the $10.

The two tiers above Starter are for a different customer. Pro is $99 a month for 3 million characters, then $8 per million, and adds professional voice cloning; Scale is $499 for 10 million, then $6 per million. For narration alone they only lower the overage rate. A channel that needs a cloned voice has a reason to look at Pro; a channel that only needs more characters does not, because Starter’s overage already covers that with no ceiling.

Where it sits against the others

Same unit, one minute of finished narration, at 900 characters a minute:

OptionPriceCost per minuteFree allowance
Google Standard / WaveNet$4 / 1M chars$0.00364M chars/mo
Speechify AIspeechify.ai Starter$10/mo for 1M chars, then $10 / 1M$0.00950K chars/mo, hard cap
OpenAI tts-1$15 / 1M chars$0.0135—
ElevenLabs Starter$6/mo for 30,000 credits~$0.18—

Read that column plainly. Speechify AI Starter is about two and a half times the price of Google WaveNet per minute, and about two thirds the price of OpenAI’s tts-1. It is twenty times cheaper than ElevenLabs Starter, which is the comparison that a pricing search usually wants, but the fairer comparison is with the other two APIs, because that is the kind of product it is.

Where Google wins. Google’s free monthly allowance for Standard and WaveNet voices is 4 million characters, about 74 hours of narration a month, at no cost once billing is enabled on a Cloud account. That is 80 times Speechify AI’s free cap. If the voice is a commodity and the volume is large, Google is free where Speechify AI is $10, and Google has no credit line to display. The trade is the Cloud console: enabling billing, creating a key, and reading a page of documentation that assumes you already know what a service account is.

Where ElevenLabs wins. ElevenLabs sells voice quality, a voice library to browse, instant cloning, and an editor with a play button. None of that is on the Speechify AI free plan or Starter; cloning starts at Pro. If the voice is part of the channel’s identity, the premium is buying something real, and the narration-cost article makes the same point. The $6 tier buys about 33 minutes a month, which a Starter subscriber at Speechify AI would use in a week, so the question is whether the voice or the minutes matter more.

Where Speechify AI wins. A channel that needs more than Google’s free allowance, or would rather not open a Cloud console, and does not need a cloned voice. The free plan is a real free plan with commercial use, the Starter tier is a meter with a floor, and nothing in the price list asks for the vendor’s name in your title.

“API only” for someone who does not write code

This is the part the plan cards leave out. Speechify AI is an API. There is no web editor with a text box and a download button on these plans; you send text to an endpoint and get audio back. The consumer Speechify app has an interface, but it is a different product on different terms, and it is not the one with “Commercial use” on the free plan.

What that means in practice: a short script in whatever language you already have, or a no-code automation tool that can make an HTTP request, with the API key in it. Someone comfortable with a spreadsheet can usually manage it in an afternoon. It is the same trade as Google and OpenAI, and it is most of the reason those three cost cents per minute while the editor-based tools cost dimes. The editor is what the dimes buy.

One consequence worth knowing: retakes are metered. Every regenerated line is new characters, and on the free plan’s 50,000 a script that goes through four drafts is four scripts.

What we’d do

For a channel narrating under about 55 minutes a month with no need for a cloned voice, Speechify AI’s free plan is the cheapest legal option that does not involve a Cloud console: publishable on a monetized channel, with a credit line in the description and the AI disclosure YouTube already asks for. Past the cap, Starter at $10 is a meter that stays at $0.009 a minute however much you use.

If volume is the only thing that matters, Google WaveNet is free for longer than most channels will ever need. If the voice is the thing that matters, the money goes to ElevenLabs instead, and this page is not the one to read.

One honest caveat about this article: it is read from the vendor’s pricing page and API terms, not from running the service at volume ourselves. The plan names, character counts and overage rates were read from speechify.ai/pricing on 2026-09-08, and the two conditions from the AI Voice API terms, updated 2024-06-10, on the same day. Pricing pages change; check the card before you build a workflow on it.

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