TTS Per Minute

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Updated Nov 10, 2026 (America/New_York) · Google autocomplete: “best ai voice for audiobooks” / “best ai voice generator for audiobooks”

Best AI voice for audiobooks

“Best” is a voice-and-rights question as much as a price question. We will not invent quality scores. What we can do is put official, cited prices next to each other so you can budget a long book, then listen to each vendor’s samples yourself.

For a 100,000-character manuscript (a short book-length text; your novel may be longer), at the official character rates:

OptionOfficial rateWorked out cost for 100,000 charactersSource, Nov 10, 2026
Amazon Polly Standard$4.00 per 1M characters$0.40Polly pricing. Polly’s own examples treat 1M characters as about 23 hours 8 minutes of speech — a slower reading pace than 1,000 characters/minute.
Amazon Polly Neural$16.00 per 1M$1.60Same page
Amazon Polly Generative$30 per 1M$3.00Same page
Amazon Polly Long-Form$100.00 per 1M$10.00Same page — this is the SKU Polly names “Long-Form voices”
Google WaveNet / Standard$4 per 1M$0.40Google Cloud pricing, after the monthly free characters
Murf API Falcon / Gen 2$0.01 or $0.03 per 1K$1.00 or $3.00murf.ai/pricing
ElevenLabs API Flash or v4$0.04 or $0.08 per 1K$4.00 or $8.00ElevenLabs API pricing

Speechify Studio, if you want a creator subscription

Speechify’s Studio FAQ, checked Nov 10, 2026, lists “Podcasts and Audiobooks” as a use case and says paid Studio plans include commercial usage rights. Official prices: Free $0 (600 credits, no commercial rights); Starter $100 / year (86,400 credits; 1 credit per second of voiceover); next tier $300 / year (345,600 credits). Worked out, Starter covers 24 hours of voiceover if every credit is spent at 1 credit/second. That may or may not finish your book — it depends on running time, not character count.

Speechify Studio Try Speechify

Speechify Premium ($29 / month or $139 / year) is the reading app, not the production studio. The Studio pricing page says they are two different subscriptions.

Rights and storefront rules (ACX, Findaway, etc.) are not priced on these TTS pages. Read those rules separately before you publish a book.

How much does ElevenLabs cost per minute?ElevenLabs cost / minCheapest text to speech API in 2026Cheapest TTS APIsHow much does Speechify cost?Speechify costSpeechify vs ElevenLabsSpeechify vs ElevenLabsCheaper alternative to ElevenLabsCheaper ElevenLabs alternatives

Sources (as of Nov 10, 2026)

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