ElevenLabs, Murf, Speechify Studio and WellSaid all sell "text to speech", but they meter it four different ways — by character, by generation time, by the second, and by downloaded minutes only. For video narration, courses and audiobooks, that metering choice matters more than the headline monthly price. This guide compares the published plans on cost per finished hour, commercial terms and language support.
Starter plan. Commercial license starts here; the free plan has none.
Creator plan, billed annually ($228/year). Monthly billing is $29/mo.
Studio Starter, sold by the year. Not the same product as the Speechify reader app.
Starter plan, billed annually ($120/year). Monthly billing is $19/mo. English voices only on self-serve plans.
Need Japanese narration on a self-serve plan? On published information, your shortlist is ElevenLabs, Murf and Speechify Studio. WellSaid's Japanese voices sit behind its custom-priced Enterprise tier.
Resemble AI no longer sells voice generation to new customers. In an announcement dated August 13, 2026, the company said it had stopped selling text to speech, voice cloning and related voice products to new customers and is focusing the whole company on deepfake detection. Existing voice customers remain supported, and its open-source voice models remain available as research releases — but a new reader cannot buy it as a narration tool, so it is not in the comparison table. Older comparison articles still list its old voice plans; treat those prices as historical.
Two other names from older TTS roundups are also gone: Play.ht shut down on December 31, 2025 after Meta acquired its team, and LOVO (Genny) went offline after the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in May 2026. If a guide recommends either as a current buying option, its pricing information is out of date.
| ElevenLabs | Murf | Speechify Studio | WellSaid | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Creators and publishers who want pricing that scales with script length — audiobooks, podcasts, multilingual narration | Video and presentation voiceovers made in a visual studio editor | Steady narration volume paid for once a year — channels, courses, explainers | English-language corporate training and brand content, with heavy re-takes |
| How usage is metered | Credits: about 1 credit per character on Multilingual / v3 / v4 models; Flash and Turbo models cost less per character via the API | Voice generation time (hours per month). Re-rendering an edited block consumes its length again | Studio credits: 1 credit per second of voiceover. Dubbing and avatar video burn credits at different rates | Downloaded minutes only. Generation, previewing and retakes are unlimited on paid plans |
| Free option | Yes — 10,000 credits/month, no commercial license, attribution required | Yes — 10 minutes of generation in total, no downloads, no commercial rights | Yes — 600 credits, no downloads, no commercial rights | Trial — preview-oriented, no commercial rights |
| Paid plans from | Starter $6/mo (30,000 credits). Creator $22/mo (121,000). Pro $99/mo (600,000) | Creator $19/mo billed annually ($29 monthly) for 2 hrs/month. Business $66/mo billed annually ($99 monthly) for 8 hrs/month | Studio Starter $100/year (86,400 credits/year). Studio Creator $300/year (345,600 credits/year) | Starter $10/mo billed annually ($19 monthly) for 240 downloaded min/year. Pro $33/mo billed annually ($49 monthly) for 2,160 min/year |
| Japanese | Yes — Japanese is among the 29 languages of Multilingual v2; newer models cover more languages | Yes — Japanese is on the official language list (33 languages per the help center) | Yes — Japanese is on the Studio voiceover language list | Enterprise only. Self-serve Starter / Pro / Business plans are English voices only |
| Commercial use | Paid plans only (Starter and up). Covers monetized video, podcasts and audiobooks you have the rights to; rights in audio made while subscribed are kept after cancellation | Paid plans (Creator and up). Monetized YouTube and streaming use is covered; a Business license is recommended for companies | Paid Studio plans only. The vendor's FAQ grants ownership and perpetual commercial rights for your own projects. The separate reader subscription is personal use only | Paid plans include full commercial rights. The trial grants none |
| Broadcast & resale limits | You cannot resell the service itself, and some outputs (for example sound effects sold as standalone libraries) are excluded. Check each retailer's own AI-narration rules for audiobooks | TV and radio broadcasting rights are Enterprise-only. Reselling the voice library, or training AI models on Murf voices, is prohibited | Vendor wording is framed around "your own projects" — confirm client-deliverable and resale scope in the terms before relying on it | No self-serve voice cloning; custom voices are an Enterprise conversation. Confirm deliverable and resale scope in your contract |
| Trade-off to know | Costs follow your script's character count, not the finished minutes — dense scripts cost more for the same runtime | The clock runs on generation, including re-renders, not just on the final cut | Annual billing and an annual credit pool: the cheap per-hour rate assumes you actually use the allowance | Most expensive per downloaded hour of the four at low volumes — its value appears when you retake a lot |
Prices are USD, before tax, as published by the vendors in November 2026. Speechify sells three separate products — a reader app, Studio, and an API — with separate subscriptions; only Studio prices are shown here. Plans change — always confirm the current price and what's included on the vendor's site before you buy.
Because the four tools meter differently, headline prices mislead. Here is the same job priced four ways, using only published figures. The job: one finished 60-minute narration per month, from an English script. Using the vendor's own rule of thumb of roughly 1,000 characters per minute of speech, that script is about 60,000 characters. This is arithmetic, not a listening test.
| Tool | Plan that covers 60 min/month | Working | Effective cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Creator, $22/mo | 60,000 characters ≈ 60,000 credits. Starter's 30,000 credits are not enough, so Creator (121,000) is the covering plan | $22/mo |
| Murf | Creator, $19/mo billed annually | 60 minutes fits inside Creator's 2 hours/month of generation time — with room for roughly one full re-render | $19/mo ($29 on monthly billing) |
| Speechify Studio | Studio Starter, $100/year | 86,400 credits/year = 1,440 voiceover minutes/year, an average of 120/month — double this job | about $8.33/mo, billed annually |
| WellSaid | Pro, $33/mo billed annually | Starter's 240 downloaded minutes/year average only 20/month, so this job needs Pro (2,160/year, about 180/month) | $33/mo, billed annually |
Scale the same job to four hours a month and the order changes: Speechify Studio Creator ($300/year, about $25/mo for an average of 480 voiceover minutes/month) comes out lowest of the flat plans, then Murf Business ($66/mo billed annually, 8 hours/month), then ElevenLabs Pro ($99/mo, 600,000 credits), then WellSaid Business ($160 per user/month, whose 2,880 downloaded minutes/year match this job's 2,880 minutes exactly).
Two things flip the result in real work. First, retakes: character- and time-metered plans charge again when you re-render, while WellSaid only counts the version you download — a script you render ten times before approving can cost several times its final runtime elsewhere, and exactly its runtime at WellSaid. Second, script density: character metering charges for what is written, not what is heard, so a number-heavy script that reads in 40 minutes can still consume 60 minutes' worth of characters at ElevenLabs, while the time-metered tools charge for the 40.
Developer note: all four vendors also sell API access priced per character (for example, ElevenLabs lists $0.08 per 1,000 characters for its main models and $0.04 for its faster ones; Murf's API lists $0.03 per 1,000 characters for its studio model). On pure arithmetic those rates undercut every subscription above — 60,000 characters works out to a few dollars — but an API gives you no studio editor, and plan conditions differ. Treat API pricing as a separate route for people building narration into a product, not as the price of the tools compared here.
ElevenLabs prices narration in credits, and on its main text-to-speech models one credit is roughly one character. The free plan (10,000 credits/month) is for trying voices: it carries no commercial license, and anything you publish from it needs attribution — attribution does not make commercial use allowed. Starter ($6/mo, 30,000 credits) is where the commercial license begins, which makes it the practical floor for monetized work at low volume — about 30 minutes of narration a month on the standard models. Creator ($22/mo, 121,000 credits) covers roughly two hours, and Pro ($99/mo, 600,000 credits) roughly ten. Language coverage depends on the model: Multilingual v2 covers 29 languages including Japanese, and the newer v3 and v4 models publish much broader lists. Paid plans cover monetized videos, podcasts and audiobooks built from material you have the rights to, and the vendor states that rights in audio generated while subscribed remain after you cancel. What a plan does not settle is the destination's own rules — an audiobook retailer's AI-narration policy, for example, is separate from ElevenLabs' license.
Murf is built as a studio: you assemble narration in a visual editor alongside slides and video, and you pay for voice generation time. The free plan offers 10 minutes of generation in total, with no downloads and no commercial rights — a preview, not a starter tier. Creator ($19/mo billed annually, $29/mo monthly) includes 2 hours of generation a month, downloads and commercial rights; Business ($66/mo billed annually, $99/mo monthly) raises that to 8 hours a month and adds a business license aimed at companies. The official help center lists 33 languages including Japanese, with dedicated Japanese voices in the catalog. The licensing detail most likely to surprise people is broadcast: Murf's own help pages state that rights for traditional TV networks and commercial radio are Enterprise-only, separate from the standard commercial rights that cover monetized online video. Reselling Murf's voices, or using them to train an AI model, is prohibited.
The first thing to get right about Speechify is that it sells three separate subscriptions: a reader app that reads documents aloud to you, Studio for making voiceovers, and an API. Only Studio grants commercial voiceover rights; a reader subscription does not. Studio meters in credits at one credit per second of voiceover, shared with its dubbing and avatar features, which burn credits faster. Studio Starter ($100/year) includes 86,400 credits a year — about 24 hours of voiceover, an average of two hours a month — with commercial rights and voice cloning. Studio Creator ($300/year) includes 345,600 credits, about 96 hours a year. The free Studio tier (600 credits) has no downloads and no commercial rights. Japanese appears on Studio's published voiceover language list. In our worked examples, Studio's annual plans produce the lowest cost per finished hour at steady volumes — with the caveat that you pay for the year up front and the low rate assumes you use most of the annual pool.
WellSaid meters the opposite way from the other three: on paid plans, generation and retakes are unlimited, and only the minutes you download count against your allowance. Its voice catalog is built from recordings of licensed voice actors, which is the core of its pitch to corporate training and brand teams. Starter ($10/mo billed annually, $19/mo monthly) includes 240 downloaded minutes a year and full commercial rights; Pro ($33/mo billed annually, $49/mo monthly) includes 2,160 minutes a year; Business ($160 per user/month billed annually) includes 2,880 minutes per user a year plus team workspaces. The trial grants no commercial rights. The limitation that decides this tool for many readers is language: self-serve plans include English voices only. Japanese and other languages exist, but only inside the custom-priced Enterprise tier, alongside translation. There is also no self-serve voice cloning at any published price.
If your narration is Japanese, the self-serve shortlist is ElevenLabs, Murf and Speechify Studio. WellSaid only offers Japanese on Enterprise. Do this before comparing prices — the cheapest plan that cannot speak your language is not cheap.
Estimate finished narration minutes per month, then honestly estimate how many times you re-render. Mostly one-take work favors character or time plans; revision-heavy work is exactly what WellSaid's download-only metering rewards.
"Commercial" is not one thing. Monetized YouTube is covered by all four paid entry plans here; TV or radio broadcast is Enterprise-only at Murf; selling an audiobook also has to pass the retailer's own AI-narration rules, whatever your TTS vendor allows.
All four have a free way in. Paste an actual script — especially a Japanese one, where the English "1,000 characters per minute" rule of thumb does not carry over — and note how much of the allowance one real project consumes before you pick a plan.
It depends on the route. On ElevenLabs' subscription plans, the effective rate on the main models runs from about $0.20 per 1,000 characters on Starter ($6 for 30,000 credits) down to about $0.17 on the larger plans — that is the plan price divided by its credit allowance, at one credit per character. Its API lists $0.08 per 1,000 characters for the main models and $0.04 for the faster Flash/Turbo models. Murf's API lists $0.03 per 1,000 characters for its studio model. Murf Studio, Speechify Studio and WellSaid do not price by character at all in their studio plans — they meter time, seconds and downloaded minutes respectively, which is why this guide converts everything into cost per finished hour.
On paid plans, generally yes for content you have the rights to: ElevenLabs' paid plans cover audiobooks and client work, Murf's paid plans cover monetized video and streaming, Speechify Studio grants commercial rights for your own projects, and WellSaid's paid plans include full commercial rights. Two boundaries apply everywhere: you cannot resell the vendor's voices or service itself as your own product, and the destination sets its own rules — audiobook retailers and video platforms have their own AI-narration and disclosure policies that sit on top of the vendor's license. On free plans, commercial use is not allowed at any of the four.
ElevenLabs (Japanese is in Multilingual v2's 29 languages, and newer models cover more), Murf (Japanese is on its official language list) and Speechify Studio (Japanese is on its Studio voiceover list). WellSaid is the exception: Japanese exists only on its Enterprise tier, while its self-serve plans are English-only. Note that character allowances behave differently with Japanese scripts — the roughly 1,000-characters-per-minute figure is an English rule of thumb, so measure consumption with your own script on a free tier before choosing a plan size.
All three have left this market. Resemble AI announced on August 13, 2026 that it no longer sells voice generation to new customers and now focuses on deepfake detection (existing customers are still supported). Play.ht shut down on December 31, 2025 after Meta acquired its team. LOVO's Genny service went offline after the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in May 2026. Any pricing for them in older articles is historical — do not plan a production workflow around them.
Not automatically. Murf states explicitly that broadcasting rights for TV networks and commercial radio are Enterprise-only. For the other vendors, broadcast is not singled out in the public plan pages we checked, which is not the same as it being included — if your narration is headed for broadcast or a large paid campaign, confirm the scope in the vendor's terms or in writing before you produce it.
Because this guide is compiled from the vendors' published specifications and pricing, not from hands-on testing. We do not claim to have listened to these tools side by side. Where a judgment appears — for example, that annual Studio pricing is cheap per hour if fully used — it is arithmetic on published prices, shown next to it so you can check it yourself. For voice fit, every vendor here offers a free tier or trial; a short test with your own script tells you more than any score we could invent.