AI Voice Generator Pricing, Explained

1. Characters or character-based credits. You pay for the text you convert. ElevenLabs charges about 1 credit per character for text to speech; Cartesia also counts 1 credit per character. Every regeneration uses credits again.
2. Seconds of audio. Speechify Studio uses 1 credit per second of voiceover generated.
3. Minutes downloaded. WellSaid’s paid plans let you generate freely and only count the minutes of audio you download. Speechify Studio also lets you re-export at no extra cost.

Murf mixes models: its Studio plans are sold by hours of voice generation, while its API is billed per 1,000 characters.

You need a rough conversion to compare character-based plans with minute-based plans. Spoken English typically runs around 150 words per minute, and an average English word plus its trailing space is roughly 6 characters, so one minute of narration is very roughly 900–1,000 characters. Your actual figure depends on the voice, speed and how dense your script is, so test with a real script.

Vendors publish their own estimates too. Cartesia, for example, estimates roughly 27, 133, 1,667 and 10,667 minutes of text to speech for its Pro, Startup, Scale and Business credit allowances.

These are rough estimates using the ~1,000 characters per minute rule of thumb, before any regenerations.

Check each vendor’s pricing page for current allowances; links are in the sources below. For plan-by-plan details, see our AI voice generator comparison.

• Regenerations. On credit- and character-based plans, every retake of a line uses credits. Minute-downloaded plans (WellSaid) don’t charge for retakes.
• Other features share the same balance. On ElevenLabs, speech to text, sound effects, music, voice changer and dubbing all draw from the same credits, often at much higher rates than text to speech (for example, dubbing uses 2,000–10,000 credits per minute).
• Commercial rights. Free plans usually exclude commercial use. ElevenLabs and Cartesia include commercial rights from their cheapest paid plans.
• Overage pricing. Some plans let you buy more usage mid-month; Cartesia lists overage from $38 to $65 per 1M credits depending on plan.
• Annual vs monthly. Annual billing is often much cheaper. Murf Creator, for example, is $19/month billed annually versus $29 monthly; WellSaid Starter is $10 versus $19.

1. Count the characters in a typical script (most word processors show this).
2. Multiply by the number of scripts you produce per month, then add 20–50% for retakes.
3. Compare that total to each plan’s allowance, and use the free tier to time one real script before you commit.