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How we price an hour of finished speech

Every AI voice tool counts something different. How Dubsheet turns credits, characters, seconds and minutes into one price for an hour of speech you may publish.

Dubsheet Research26 October 20265 min readEditorial policy

On this page
  1. How many characters are in an hour
  2. The vendors’ own minutes disagree
  3. Two hours a month, and ten
  4. The cheapest plan you may publish from
  5. What it changes: four tools on 20 Oct 2026
  6. Dubbing is priced on its own
  7. What is left out
  8. Sources

An hour of finished speech is about 52,000 characters of script. We measured it, and it is the number every price on Dubsheet is built on.

AI voice tools are hard to compare because no two of them count the same thing. ElevenLabs counts credits, one for each character. Murf counts hours of generated audio. Speechify Studio counts credits by the second. Narakeet sells minutes in packs. Fish Audio counts credits at about 600 a minute. A plan card that says “121,000 credits” and another that says “2 hours” can’t be set side by side until both are turned into the same thing.

So every listing here carries one figure: what a month costs on the cheapest public plan that makes speech you may use commercially, and what that comes to per hour.

How many characters are in an hour

52,000 characters, with spaces and punctuation, is one hour of narration at a normal pace.

The pace comes from audiobook narration. ACX, Audible’s production marketplace, says most narrators read about 9,300 words an hour, or 155 a minute.

The characters come from our own count. We took five books from Project Gutenberg (numbers 1342, 2701, 84, 1661 and 98), kept the body text and collapsed the whitespace. That is 655,590 words and 3,664,473 characters, 5.59 characters a word. 9,300 words at 5.59 is 51,987 characters, which we round to 52,000.

The vendors’ own minutes disagree

Each vendor’s idea of a minute is its own voices’ pace, so we never use it.

  • ElevenLabs: “One minute of audio costs approximately 1000 characters”, which makes an hour 60,000 (pricing).
  • Cartesia: 750 to 800 credits a minute, one credit a character (pricing docs).
  • Amazon Polly: 1 million characters is “~23 hours, 8 min”, about 43,200 an hour (pricing).
  • Narakeet: 150 to 250 words a minute, “divide the word count by 200” (duration guide).

Between the fastest and the slowest estimate, an hour of script moves by 39%. Price each tool at its own estimate and you compare different amounts of script. We price the same script everywhere: 52,000 characters for plans that count characters, 9,300 words for plans that count words, and 60 minutes for plans that count audio.

Two hours a month, and ten

The headline figure is two hours of finished speech a month. That is a weekly video or a short course. The second figure, ten hours, is a 93,000-word book a month or a daily narrated video.

We take the cheapest public plan that covers the month, at its regular monthly price. If the plan runs short and sells more speech at a published price, we add that. If it sells no more, the plan drops out at that level.

The cheapest plan you may publish from

A plan counts only if its terms allow commercial use of the audio. The cheapest plan is often not one of them.

  • ElevenLabs Free is “Personal use only”.
  • Murf Free has “No Commercial Rights”.
  • Speechify Studio’s free plan has “No commercial usage rights”.

A creator who publishes a monetised video needs the first plan that allows it, so that is where the figure starts.

What it changes: four tools on 20 Oct 2026

Here is the rule on four text-to-speech tools, read on their own pricing pages on 20 Oct 2026. Prices are in US dollars, billed monthly.

Tool What it counts Entry plan 2 hours a month 10 hours a month
Narakeet Minutes, in packs that never expire $6 $12 (1,000-minute pack), $6 an hour $48 (2,500-minute pack), $4.80 an hour
Speechify Studio Credits, 1 a second $19 $19 (Starter), $9.50 an hour No public plan covers it
ElevenLabs Credits, 1 a character $6 $22 (Creator), $11 an hour $99 (Pro), $9.90 an hour
Murf Hours of generated audio $29 $29 (Creator), $14.50 an hour No public plan covers it

Sorted by entry price, ElevenLabs and Narakeet tie at $6. Priced on two hours of speech you may publish, Narakeet comes to $12 and ElevenLabs to $22. At ten hours only two of the four sell the month at all: Speechify Studio’s top plan stops at 28,800 seconds (8 hours) and Murf’s Business plan at 8 hours, and neither sells more.

Two notes on how the figures were made. Narakeet’s packs never expire, so a pack counts at its own rate per minute only if a steady month uses it up within a year: at two hours, the 1,000-minute pack lasts about eight months. ElevenLabs sells extra credits at a price its pages don’t state, so a smaller plan with top-ups might cost less than Pro. The listing says so beside the figure.

Dubbing is priced on its own

Dubbing a video costs different credits from narrating a script, often on the same plan. HeyGen charges 4 credits a minute to translate a video without lip sync (help centre). Fliki charges a voice rate, an export rate and a charge for each run. So dubbing tools carry a second figure: 60 minutes of your own video dubbed into one language a month, as four 15-minute videos. Lip sync is a separate row, not part of the figure.

What is left out

Voice cloning, premium voices, extra seats, one-time fees, sales tax and first-month offers are not in the figure. Each has its own row on the listing. A plan sold only yearly is shown at its monthly equivalent and marked as billed yearly.

Every price on a listing is the vendor’s own, quoted from its pricing page with the date we read it. Dubsheet compares software. It does not give legal advice on licences, cloning or consent. Where a rule matters, the listing quotes the vendor’s own terms.

Sources

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