AI Narration Cost Per Minute Compared

Last updated: 4 October 2026

Author: Greg Preece — I cover AI video tools and practical creator workflows.

Prices checked weekly on each vendor's own pricing page.

The short answer

To create under 30 finished minutes of narration a month, ElevenLabs Starter is cheapest at $6 a month. Push past 33 minutes and that plan runs dry, the next ElevenLabs plan up costs $22, and Fish Audio Plus becomes the cheaper way to get the job done at $15.

That is not the only place the answer flips. Between 30 minutes a month and 1,600 the cheapest option changes hands four times, because none of these tools charge on the same thing. ElevenLabs charges you per character of script, Fish Audio sells you a number of minutes, and Speechify Studio sells you a year of audio up front. The only way to put them side by side is to work out what one finished minute of narration costs on each.

What one minute costs at three volumes

Each row is the cheapest plan on that tool on monthly billing (where the tool offers it).

Tool	30 minutes a month	200 minutes a month	1,600 minutes a month
ElevenLabs	Starter, $6, 20 cents a minute	Pro, $99, 50 cents a minute	Scale, $299, 19 cents a minute
Fish Audio	Plus, $15, 50 cents a minute	Plus, $15, 8 cents a minute	Pro, $100, 6 cents a minute
Speechify Studio	Studio Starter, $100 a year, 28 cents a minute	Studio Creator, $300 a year, 13 cents a minute	No plan goes this high
Descript	Descript prices media you upload rather than audio it generates, and publishes no rate for a single job, so it cannot be put on this axis at all. What it costs you is in its own section below.

The ElevenLabs figure at 200 minutes looks wrong and is not. ElevenLabs Creator covers 134 minutes for $22, which is not enough, and the plan above it is $99. You pay for the overshoot.

What a minute means here

A finished minute is 60 seconds of exported narration, counted once, with no second takes.

A 150 words a minute prediction is used, which is the ordinary pace for read narration. At that pace a minute of script is roughly 900 characters including spaces.

Prices are in US dollars as the vendors served them on 4 October 2026. Where a plan has monthly and yearly billing, the table uses monthly and the sections below give both.

Nothing here counts the cost of a second attempt. Every one of these tools charges you again when you regenerate a line, so a script you get right first time is the best case and not the normal one.

Where the cheapest option change

Below 12 minutes the free plans cover you, though only ElevenLabs lets you sell what comes out of one. From 12 to 33 minutes ElevenLabs Starter at $6 is cheapest. From 34 to 200 minutes Fish Audio Plus at $15 is, and it stays cheapest across that whole stretch because ElevenLabs has nothing between $22 and $99.

From 201 to 666 minutes ElevenLabs Pro at $99 takes it back, by a single dollar over Fish Audio Pro. From 667 minutes to 1,620 Fish Audio Pro at $100 wins outright, at 6 cents a minute against 15. Above 1,620 minutes Fish Audio has only its Max plan left, which costs more per minute than Pro does, so ElevenLabs Scale at $299 is cheaper.

The practical reading is that nobody wins this on price across the board, and the gap at any given volume is large enough to matter. At 200 minutes a month the cheap answer costs $15 and the expensive one costs $99.

ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs charges 1 credit per character of text you turn into speech on its website, which its help pages confirm and its pricing page does not mention. Generations through the API are cheaper.

I have used it for voiceover work. I pasted a script into the editor to test it. Moving from version 2 to version 3 taught me that picking a voice takes more thought than scrolling the list. Getting one blend right took me three separate generations and a tweak to a tag, and tags like applause, door creak and crowd sounds do work.

The gotcha is that paying ElevenLabs more barely helps. Starter works out at 18 cents a finished minute and Business at 15, so a bill 165 times larger buys a rate 18% better. Scale at $299 a month and Business at $990 come out at the same cost per minute as Pro at $99. If you are on Pro and wondering whether the bigger plan is better value, it isn't, and you are only buying headroom.

One more thing the pricing page doesn't say. Some shared voices in the Voice Library carry a multiplier on what they cost to use, so the flat rate stops being flat depending on whose voice you pick.

Full plan detail is on my ElevenLabs page, and you can try ElevenLabs here. If you want the longer argument for it over the rest of the field for paid voiceover work, that's in my piece on choosing a voice generator for freelance work.

Fish Audio

Fish Audio is the cheapest way to buy narration in volume, at 6 cents a finished minute on Pro against 15 on ElevenLabs. It sells plans in credits and also prints a minute limit on each one, and those two numbers do not agree.

Fish Audio says a minute of generation costs roughly 600 to 625 credits. Run that against what each plan includes and the credits buy about twice the audio the minute limit allows. Plus comes with 250,000 credits, which is 408 minutes at the stated rate, and the plan says 200 minutes. Pro works out the same way. On Max the credits imply 40,850 minutes against a stated 6,250, which is six and a half times out.

Fish Audio's plans on 4 October 2026, showing the credit figure and the minute limit on each one, and the struck-through commercial use row on the free plan.

Whichever number binds, it is the smaller one, so read the minutes and ignore the credits. That matters most on Max, where the big credit figure hides the real problem. Max costs $749 a month on yearly billing for 6,250 minutes, which is 12 cents a minute against Pro's 5. The biggest plan Fish Audio sells is more than twice as expensive per minute as the one below it.

The free plan is also not what the page first appears to say. Commercial use is listed on the free plan and struck through, and the questions at the bottom of the same page confirm free output is for personal projects only. So the 7 free minutes are for trying it, not for client work.

Cheapest of all is Fish Audio's own API, at $15 for 1 million bytes of text, which Fish Audio says is about 12 hours of speech. The API works out at roughly 2 cents a minute, a third of Fish Audio's best subscription rate, and you need a developer to wire it up.

Speechify Studio

Speechify Studio is a separate product from the Speechify reader app most people have heard of, and it is the only part of Speechify that publishes a rate. Voiceover costs 1 credit a second, so a minute costs 60.

Speechify Studio's plans on 4 October 2026. The price is yearly and the amount of audio next to it carries no period at all.

Studio Starter is $100 a year for 86,400 credits, which the page's own tooltip calls 24 hours of voiceover. Studio Creator is $300 a year for 96 hours. Priced across a year that is 7 cents a finished minute on Starter and 5 cents on Creator, which would make it the cheapest option here.

The gotcha is that the page never says whether those hours are the year's total or refresh every month, and the difference is twelvefold. I have priced it as the year's total, which is the cautious reading and the one the yearly price implies. If it turns out to refresh monthly, Speechify Studio beats everything else on this page at every volume.

The free plan gives you 10 minutes and no commercial rights, so it cannot be used for anything you get paid for.

Descript

Descript doesn't belong on a cost-per-minute axis and it is worth saying why rather than leaving a gap.

It meters media minutes on what you upload or record, not on what it generates, and a script you type in uses none of them. The part that would make narration is paid for in AI credits, and Descript publishes no rate for a single job. Its help pages say only that the cost scales with the size of the job, with two specific actions capped at 30 credits a file.

So there is no honest way to say what a minute of Descript narration costs. What is published is the plan prices. Hobbyist is $16 a person a month on yearly billing and comes with 400 AI credits. Creator is $24 with 800, and Business is $50 with 1,500. None of it rolls over.

If you already edit in Descript, the voice work is bundled into a tool you're paying for anyway, and that is a reasonable thing to buy. It just isn't comparable to the others. Plan detail is on my Descript page, and you can try Descript here. There is a closer look at how it handles voices against ElevenLabs in my comparison of the two on voice cloning.

What each plan actually gives you

ElevenLabs Starter is advertised at $1 for the first month and costs $6 a month after that, with the cheap first month marked as running until 18 October 2026. ElevenLabs is also running 3 times the usual credits on Creator and above until 12 October 2026.

ElevenLabs is the only tool here that rolls credits over. Up to twice a month's worth carries forward, so a balance can reach three months of audio, and all of it disappears if you downgrade or cancel. Its free plan carries no commercial licence. Credits bought as a one-off sit outside rollover and expire a year after purchase.

Fish Audio resets every month with no rollover, and unused minutes are gone. Its free plan caps a single generation at 500 characters, which is about 30 seconds, so long scripts have to be fed in pieces.

Speechify Studio charges you again for any change that goes back through the model, which includes pitch, speed and emotion. Turning the volume up or down is free, and re-exporting something you already generated costs nothing.

Descript's media minutes count uploaded and recorded footage. A still image counts as 1 second, and a recorded call is charged once rather than once per person.

Who this is for

Narrating under half an hour a month, ElevenLabs Starter at $6 is the one to buy, and you get the rollover.

Narrating a few hours a month, go to Fish Audio Plus at $15, and read the minute limit rather than the credit number.

Narrating 10 hours a month or more, Fish Audio Pro costs $100, or $75 on yearly billing. Skip Max, which works out dearer per minute.

Already editing in Descript, stay there and treat the voice work as part of what you already pay for.

Comfortable with an API, Fish Audio's is about 2 cents a minute and the cheapest thing on this page by a distance.

Where this comparison breaks down

This compares price, and nothing else. It says nothing about which of these voices you would actually want in your video, and that is the thing most people choose on. A tool at 6 cents a minute you have to re-record is more expensive than one at 20.

The 150 words a minute is a generic pace, not mine and not yours. A slower read makes every ElevenLabs value worse and leaves the Fish Audio and Speechify numbers untouched, because those two sell time and ElevenLabs sells characters.

Speechify Studio's position rests on reading its hours as a yearly total. The page doesn't say, and I have flagged it above rather than quietly picking the flattering version.

Other tools narrate from a script and are not here. This covers the four I track for this job, not the market.

Across 10 launches and about 251 replies read since August, no complaint about ElevenLabs has recurred often enough to report. The same holds for Fish Audio, across 10 launches and about 79 replies. I have no equivalent reading for Speechify or Descript, so I am not making a claim about either in any direction.

Method and freshness

Prices checked weekly on each vendor's own pricing page. Every figure here was read on 4 October 2026, with the monthly and yearly settings opened on each one. Last updated 4 October 2026.

AI Narration Cost Per Minute: What a Finished Minute Actually Costs