Updated Nov 10, 2026 (America/New_York) · Google autocomplete: “best text to speech for youtube” / “best text to speech for youtube videos”

Best text to speech for YouTube

A YouTube voiceover has two costs: the generation bill, and whether the plan actually allows commercial publishing. We only repeat commercial-license language that was printed on official pages we fetched on Nov 10, 2026. We do not invent a “best sounding” ranking.

Official prices for a 60-second Short

At a 1,000-characters-per-minute planning assumption, a 60-second script is about 1,000 characters (ElevenLabs’ own table uses that conversion). Official unit prices then give:

• Google WaveNet / Polly Standard: about $0.004 ($4 per 1M characters)
• Murf Falcon API: $0.01
• ElevenLabs Flash / Turbo: $0.04
• ElevenLabs v4: $0.08

Sources: Google, Polly, Murf, ElevenLabs API, as of Nov 10, 2026. A longer 10-minute narration is ten times those amounts at the same assumption.

Commercial use, as printed

• ElevenLabs: the Starter plan and above list a “Commercial License.” Starter is $1 the first month, then $6 per month. The Free plan’s pricing row we fetched does not list a commercial license. Source: elevenlabs.io/pricing.
• Speechify Studio: Free plan lists “No commercial usage rights.” Studio Starter ($100 / year) and the $300 / year tier list “Commercial usage rights.” The FAQ says you can use Studio for YouTube. Source: pricing-studio.
• Speechify Premium ($29 / month or $139 / year) is the reading app, not the voiceover studio.
• Google Cloud and Amazon Polly are billed as cloud APIs; their acceptable-use and data-processing terms are on those platforms. We are not restating those terms here.

AI avatar video with built-in voices (Synthesia)

If the job is a YouTube video with an on-screen AI avatar and a built-in voice, that is a different product than a text-to-speech API. Synthesia is an AI video platform. Its official pricing page, checked Nov 10, 2026, lists these individual plans (monthly billing):

• Basic, $0 / month: 500 credits per month; 10 minutes of Studio video creation or dubbing; 3 survey responses; videos carry a Synthesia watermark. The compare table lists 9 AI avatars on Basic.
• Starter: $9 the first month, then $19 per month, billed monthly, with 1,250 credits per month. The same page says that is “up to ~12 minutes of video / month, on top of the free allowance,” plus “125+ Synthesia AI Avatars,” downloads, and no Synthesia logo. Yearly billing is listed at $14 / month, $168 / year, with 15,000 credits per year (the page also says “3 months free” on the yearly Starter card).
• Pro (labeled “Most popular”): $49 the first month, then $89 per month, billed monthly, with 6,000 credits per month — “up to ~60 minutes of video / month, on top of the free allowance,” 5 personal avatars, and 180+ stock AI avatars. Yearly billing is listed at $59 / month, $708 / year, with 72,000 credits per year (the page also says “4 months free” on the yearly Pro card). Higher credit tiers with small percentage discounts are also printed on that page.
• Enterprise: custom pricing.

The same official page says paid plans include 140+ languages and voices, that credits are a shared pool across video, dubbing and other features, and that a Studio Express-1 custom avatar is a paid add-on at $1,000 / year for annual-plan users only. Those figures are Synthesia’s list prices, not a TTS per-minute API rate. Source: synthesia.io/pricing, as of Nov 10, 2026.

Related: cheaper alternatives, Speechify cost, ElevenLabs cost per minute.