AI Tools

What does an AI voice generator cost per 1,000 words?

Published 2026-11-01 · Researched and price-checked on official sources

An AI voice generator costs between $0.02 and about $1.35 per 1,000 words of finished audio, depending on whether you buy subscription credits or per-character API time. ElevenLabs Creator works out to $1.21 per 1,000 words; Amazon Polly Neural, $0.096. Every rate below was checked on the vendor's own pricing page on November 1, 2026.

Key facts

What matters

ElevenLabs Creator is $22 a month for 121,000 credits, which its pricing page equates to about 121 minutes of speech: $1.21 per 1,000 words at 150 words a minute.
Amazon Polly Neural and Google Cloud Neural2 both charge $16 per 1 million characters, about $0.096 per 1,000 words, roughly 12 times less than ElevenLabs Creator.
Murf's API is the cheapest per character at $0.01 per 1,000 characters on its Falcon 2.1 model, $0.06 per 1,000 words, and purchased credit never expires.
ElevenLabs' commercial licence starts at Starter ($6 a month); the free plan includes 10,000 credits and no commercial rights.
Polly's free tier of 5 million Standard or 1 million Neural characters a month lasts 12 months, so it is a trial rather than a permanent free plan.

How these numbers were built

Every rate here comes from the vendor's own pricing page, opened on November 1, 2026, with the store set to USD. No forum quotes, no reseller estimates, no vendor comparison charts.

The awkward part is that the four vendors bill in three different units. ElevenLabs sells credits against a monthly subscription. Murf's API bills per 1,000 characters. Google Cloud and Amazon Polly bill per character at a rate that changes by voice tier. Comparing them requires one shared unit, which is 1,000 words of script.

That conversion uses 6,000 characters per 1,000 words, six characters per word including the space, and a narration pace of 150 words a minute, which puts 1,000 words near 6.7 minutes of audio. ElevenLabs' own plan maths supports it: the pricing page lists 30,000 credits as roughly 30 minutes of speech, so 121,000 credits lands near 121 minutes.

Two limits. The figures exclude taxes and VAT, which ElevenLabs states under its plan grid. They also assume you use the plan's full allowance; a month where you generate half the credits doubles your effective cost per word.

ElevenLabs: what a subscription actually buys

ElevenLabs is the most expensive vendor in this comparison per word, and its pricing page explains the premium in the feature list rather than the numbers.

Free is 10,000 credits a month with no commercial licence. Starter is $6 a month for 30,000 credits and adds the commercial licence, instant voice cloning and 20 Studio projects. Creator is $22 for 121,000 credits and adds professional voice cloning, the tier most freelance voiceover users land on. Pro is $99 for 600,000 credits, Scale $299 for 1.8 million credits and three workspace seats, and Business $990 for 6 million credits and ten seats.

Run those credits through the page's own minute equivalents and the per-word price barely moves: Starter is $0.20 a minute, or $1.33 per 1,000 words; Creator $0.18, or $1.21; Pro $0.165, or $1.10. Buying the bigger plan saves about 17% end to end, which is mild next to what the per-character vendors do at volume.

Top-ups matter for budgeting. The page quotes an extra minute at about $0.36 on Starter and about $0.17 on Pro, so a project that overshoots Creator's 121 minutes is billed near $0.18 a minute until the cycle resets. Additional credits appear as a Creator feature rather than a Starter one, so the $6 tier is a hard ceiling, not a soft one.

Murf: per-character API billing

Murf prices its API by the character, which makes the comparison unusually clean. Falcon 2.1, the model its page describes as tuned for conversational AI and real-time agents, is $0.01 per 1,000 characters, $0.06 per 1,000 words. Gen2, the studio-quality model, is $0.03 per 1,000 characters, $0.18 per 1,000 words.

Two details change how the bill feels in practice. The page states that purchased credit never expires, which suits project work: a top-up bought in March is still usable in December. And the trial is $10 of API credit with no card, enough for about 1 million Falcon characters or 333,000 Gen2 characters.

Adjacent features are billed separately and matter if you dub existing audio: speech-to-text at $0.24 an hour, translation at $0.02 per 1,000 characters, and voice changing at $0.10 a minute. Straight text-to-speech never has to touch those rates.

Google Cloud and Amazon Polly: the commodity floor

Google Cloud and Amazon Polly sell the same commodity in almost the same tiers, which makes them easy to hold against each other.

Both charge $4 per 1 million characters for standard voices, about $0.024 per 1,000 words. Both charge $16 per 1 million for the mid tier: Google calls it Neural2, Amazon calls it Neural, and $0.096 per 1,000 words is the number that matters for most narration work. Both charge $30 per 1 million for the generative tier, Google's Chirp 3 HD and Polly's Generative voices, $0.18 per 1,000 words.

The tops of the two ladders diverge. Google's Studio voices are $160 per 1 million characters, $0.96 per 1,000 words, priced for long-form narration with a consistent voice. Polly's Long-Form voices are $100 per 1 million, $0.60 per 1,000 words, and Amazon positions them for multi-minute reading rather than short prompts.

Polly's free tier is worth reading closely because it expires: 5 million Standard characters and 1 million Neural characters a month, for the first 12 months.

Why 1,000 words costs 12 times more on one platform

The gap between $0.096 and $1.21 per 1,000 words is not a margin trick. It is two different products wearing the same category label.

Polly Neural and Google Neural2 sell synthesis. You send text, you get audio, and you own the rest of the pipeline: script formatting, timing, the edit. ElevenLabs sells a production tool: instant and professional voice cloning, dubbing, sound effects, music, image and video tools, a Studio workspace and a commercial licence attached to the plan. None of that appears in a per-character API price.

Where the premium earns out: a channel that needs a consistent cloned voice, a small team dubbing a course into three languages, anyone whose workflow collapses without a browser interface. Where it does not: 100,000 words of product documentation, an audiobook back catalogue, or an app that speaks short prompts at runtime. For those, the per-character vendors deliver the same 1,000 words for roughly a tenth of the price, and the quality gap at the Neural2 or Generative tier is real but rarely decisive for plain narration.

One caveat that no price table can settle: generate the same 300-word paragraph on each platform's trial and listen before committing. ElevenLabs gives 10,000 credits, Murf gives $10 of API credit, and Polly's free tier covers a million Neural characters a month for a year.

The catches that change the bill

Commercial rights are gated. ElevenLabs attaches the commercial licence to Starter and above. The free 10,000 credits do not include it, so anyone publishing voiceover for a client starts at $6 a month, not zero.

Subscription allowances reset. ElevenLabs credits are granted per month, so a quiet month wastes the allotment. Murf's purchased credit is stated to never expire. For work that runs three weeks on and three months off, that difference can outweigh a lower headline rate.

Free tiers expire or exclude rights. Polly's free tier is explicitly for the first 12 months, and ElevenLabs' free plan carries no commercial licence. Neither is a production plan.

Consumer apps are priced on a different logic. Speechify Premium is $29 a month or $139 billed yearly for 1,000+ voices across 60+ languages, and it is a reading and listening app first. Its economics only work if you also want the reader, the 5x speed control and the Drive or Notion integrations; judged as a per-character synthesis service it is the wrong comparison.

Taxes sit outside every number here. ElevenLabs states that plan prices exclude all taxes, levies and duties, and Google and Amazon publish US rates before tax.

Which one to buy

Under 20,000 words a month, and you need cloning or dubbing: ElevenLabs Creator at $22. Its 121 minutes covers a month of short-form video, and professional voice cloning only appears at that tier.
Bulk narration, 100,000 words or more: Amazon Polly Neural at $16 per million characters, which puts 90,000 words (about ten hours of audio) near $8.64. Step up to Long-Form at $100 per million only if you need a voice that holds up across long reads.
An app or voice agent speaking at runtime: Murf Falcon 2.1 at $0.01 per 1,000 characters. Prompts are short, and latency matters more than emotiveness.
Testing this week: Polly's free tier, Murf's $10 credit or ElevenLabs' 10,000 free credits, all without a paid commitment.
You already pay for a reader app: Speechify at $139 a year, if listening to documents is the actual job and generation is a side errand.

At a glance

Vendor and tier	Official rate	Cost per 1,000 words
ElevenLabs Starter	$6/mo for 30,000 credits (~30 min)	$1.33
ElevenLabs Creator	$22/mo for 121,000 credits (~121 min)	$1.21
ElevenLabs Pro	$99/mo for 600,000 credits (~600 min)	$1.10
Murf Falcon 2.1 (API)	$0.01 per 1,000 characters	$0.06
Murf Gen2 (API)	$0.03 per 1,000 characters	$0.18
Google Cloud Standard	$4 per 1M characters	$0.024
Google Neural2	$16 per 1M characters	$0.096
Google Chirp 3 HD	$30 per 1M characters	$0.18
Amazon Polly Neural	$16 per 1M characters	$0.096
Amazon Polly Generative	$30 per 1M characters	$0.18
Amazon Polly Long-Form	$100 per 1M characters	$0.60
Speechify Premium	$29/mo or $139 billed yearly	Plan-based, no per-character rate

Verified rates from each vendor's pricing page on November 1, 2026. The last column applies the vendor's own rate to 6,000 characters, about 6.7 minutes at 150 words a minute.

FAQ

Is ElevenLabs free for commercial use?

No. The commercial licence is listed as a Starter feature, so paid plans start at $6 a month (30,000 credits). The free plan includes 10,000 credits a month with no commercial rights.

How much audio do 121,000 ElevenLabs credits make?

About 121 minutes, since the pricing page equates 30,000 credits with roughly 30 minutes of speech. At 150 spoken words a minute that is near 18,000 words for $22, about $1.21 per 1,000 words.

What is the cheapest AI voice generator per word?

Standard voices are the floor: Google Cloud and Amazon Polly both charge $4 per 1 million characters, roughly $0.024 per 1,000 words. For studio-quality output, Murf Gen2, Polly Generative and Google Chirp 3 HD all land near $0.18 per 1,000 words.